So You Think You Can Dance?

Why learn a new dance when so many are still dancing to the same song?

I am sure you have heard many of your colleagues say just this...Why teach my students technology standards...it won't help them on the achievement tests, or teach them how to write, or help all of the behavior issues of little Johnny?!  The speaker of this statement is clearly saying, "I am a digital immigrant, and I am not comfortable with fixing something that isn't broken."  However, this statement couldn't be more false! 

In the educational system we are seeing more and more behavioral challenges, the need to differentiate instruction, the need to maximize instruction to a group of students with limited attention to task, and the list goes on.  It is so important for educators with a knack for technology to help facilitate other colleagues to take the plunge, or "learn a new song and dance".

I recently met with my second grade team to completely revamp their original "safe" poster making lesson on animals in Ohio habitats.  In order to get them on board I created a web quest and showed them how easy this instruction is to implement in the classroom.  I used my class as the model classroom.  I brought two other classes and their teachers into my room to demonstrate the lesson.  The students and teachers watched in amazement.  The teachers were especially excited to see the students remaining engaged in their own learning, the amount of differentiation available, and the excitement that previous research lessons have never created.

Then we broke the students up into cooperative learning teams.  There they used this web quest to create a "fact file" brochure in Microsoft Publisher.  The students took complete ownership of their learning, and demonstrated their learning in the printing of their final product.  Parents, teachers, students, and the principal were shocked to see that second grade students could create an informative document using a program that previously was geared toward adults in a professional world. 

At the conclusion of this project the two teachers who chose to stay with the poster product decided, that although they used the web quest for the student research, next year they would be pairing all students up to complete a product like we had created.  It was a success!  So the dance continues.  As I continue to learn more in my course at Indiana Wesleyan University, I will continue to find new steps in the "dance" we know called Teaching!