Digital Nativity

This year, I have moved over from being a language arts and social studies teacher to being a computer teacher.  I taught langauge for ten years, and slowly added more and more technology to my classroom methods.  Then a chance came along for me and my wife to move to a little independent school in a wonderful little mountain town.  We took it and I have become the technology department.

Up to now, I have only taught middle and high school students.  Now, I’ve got kindergarten to grade 9, the range of our school.    So far, school is wonderful.  The kids are all so eager to get on the computers.  Even the little people have been good to me so far.  I was very nervous about running classes with very small people.   So far the kindgergarden and grades one and two students have been making pictures and group signs with Tux Paint.  Grades three and four have started off with some publishing of poems and signs with Word.  Grade five has begun to practice some keyboarding skills on the BBC site Dance Mat Typing.  They absolutley love it. It’s hosted by an unusual set of characters – it begins with a goat with a Scottish accent that cheers them along.  Some students run up to me each day to tell me how far they have progressed at home.  The grade sixes are getting started on Chris Craft’s Life ‘Round Here project.  The grade sevens began with a bit of online safety that was inspired by an idea from Clarence Fisher in Snow Lake.  The grade eights and nines take computers together.  They have been setting up Google Readers and blogs on learnerblogs.

One of my goals for this year is to get every class I teach collaborating with another class somewhere else.

My biggest issue is equipment.  Our school did not run a computer program last year and the equipment that we had was old the year before that when it was piled in the room to gather dust.   I managed to weed the collection down to the very best of the worst.  We’ve got three machines that run Windows XP, two that run Windows 2000 (slowly) and five that still run Windows 98.  I had to get rid of all the Macs. They were the same ones that I saw some university using as a doorstop.

That’s it.  It’s time for bed and I have made my first professional blog post.