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One of the most exciting things about the classrooms in our schools is nearly every single classroom has an interactive white board. Teachers create interactive lessons so that their students can be actively engaged in hands-on learning activities in every subject area. Standards are being taught, student progress is monitored on a daily basis, student learning is assessed, and in the midst of all of this, students are eager to learn because their teachers are utilizing technology in the classrooms. Technology serves as the vehicle that drives student engagement and this helps us as teachers to achieve our ultimate goal of student achievement.
The students in our classrooms today are digital natives, which means that they were born into this culture of wireless — 3G, 4G, texting, Facebook and Bluetooth. That’s why I love the challenge of being an elementary library/media specialist at Lincoln Heights and Longfellow elementary schools. I have the unique opportunity to support both nearly 700 students per week, and their teachers, by helping them discover how to purposefully utilize the digital technology tools that are available to them.
Web 2.0 (free online) tools provide meaningful and easy-to-use venues for students to publish and share their own creative writing. One of my students’ favorite Web 2.0 tools is blogging. The definition of a blog, according to Google, is: “A website on which an individual or group of users record opinions, information, etc. on a regular basis.” Blogging provides students with the ability to experience real life text-to-world connections at the click of a mouse.
This past fall, a group of fifth-grade students created a blog about a book that we’d just finished reading in class called “Stolen Children.” The author, Peg Kehret, posted a comment to their blog the very next morning, telling them how much she appreciated reading their kind words about her book and she even offered them some helpful hints on how great writers come up with ideas for their stories. If only you could have seen the students’ eyes light up when they had immediate feedback from an author they admire and respect. The ability to interact with authors that they admire and respect is one way that blogging encourages students to become better writers.
Another one of the exciting things about working with teachers and students is, through collaboration between teachers and the media center, student-created work in the classroom can be transformed into multimedia presentations. Those presentations can be uploaded to the Internet for grandma, grandpa and the whole wide world to see.
Recently, after a group of second-graders produced their own YouTube video reflection of author Peter Reynolds book, “The Dot,” I decided to post a link to the student created video on the author’s Facebook page. Within minutes, the author wrote right back to the class. He wrote, “To the wonderful creative students of Scottsbluff Public Schools in Mrs. Howard’s second-grade class, I’m so glad you liked my book, ‘The Dot.’ I loved your Dot creations and your awesome movie! I encourage you all to keep creating your beautiful marks in the world. Sincerely, Peter Reynolds.”
It was amazing to see the faces of the students after receiving the instant gratification when they saw that the author cared enough about their work to compliment their efforts.
That’s what makes my job most meaningful, is seeing students’ faces light up with joy when they see their own work published on the World Wide Web for all the world to see.
The students that we teach are eager to devour every bit of technology that comes their way. For these digital natives, it’s just life as they know it, and that, for me and their teachers, is a very good thing.
Angie Shaw is an elementary library/media specialist at Lincoln Heights and Longfellow Elementary schools in Scottsbluff, Nebraska and can be reached at ashaw@sbps.net.
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