Thursday, February, 25th, 2010
Posted in Mrs newton
1 Comment
Week 1
It’s the start of another new school year. That makes my 16th year of teaching middle school science. Over the summer I created PowerPoint slides for some of the labs for the first grading period. The slides have all the lab notes, pictures, and even some sound files. I think I did a great job on them and that this will be a great improvement and a good use of technology. I’m excited about using the slides. I also found some good websites that I’ll use during classtime. I have my own webpage on the school server—all teachers have to have one. I’m able to update it well enough at the start of each year, and managed to get this year’s information posted a week early! So, I’m ready to go for the year.
To illustrate the problems faced by teachers who did not grow up with the same level of technology as the students they are teaching, we created Mrs. Newton, a middle school science teacher. Mrs. Newton has been teaching for about twenty years. She has a graduate degree and takes one education course every two years to maintain her licensure. She has a traditional answering machine on her home phone but also uses a cell phone. In short, Mrs. Newton is a typical digital immigrant. She is comfortable with trying new technology, but she has no experience integrating new technology into her teaching. We present her point of view in her journal.