This video was surprisingly short so it was kind of easy to pick on the teacher this week. I thought of a few things I might do differently than she did, starting with the classroom set up. I noticed one little boy had his back to the screen, so she should have made it easier for all of the kids to see the screen and be comfortable doing so. I would have liked to see this happening with more than one computer; a computer lab would be ideal. Kids work really well with hands on activities and it would have been nice for them to be doing more than listening and answering questions. It looked like the teacher had them all staring at the TV with her computer screen on it... why not a projector? It is very likely these students had a hard time seeing what she was doing. I also felt really bad for the girl that did not know the answer to her question. She looked like she froze on the spot so it would have been nice to see a bit of reassurance from the teacher, letting her know it was alright to forget sometimes. I did like how she switched the question to her partner, Christian, though.
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Ashley, I'll admit that this video was downright painful for me to watch - I can only be grateful that it was no longer than 4 minutes! Floppy disks, a single classroom computer connected to a TV, e-mail, attachments - we sure have come a long way. Honestly, rather than describe what I'd do differently, it'd be easier for me to describe what I'd do the same as this teacher - and that would be nothing!
ReplyDeleteBut the reason I had us watch this video is to show how quickly technology moves. This book was published in 2006, with a revision in 2008. Yet this video seems so archaic - we've moved onto SmartBoards, flash drives, cloud computing, video conferencing, 1-to-1 laptops in the classroom, wireless access, etc. Technology moves quickly, and so must we, if we expect to be able to prepare our students for a future that we can't even fathom.
With that said, though, I agree wholeheartedly that the teacher needed to better engage the students. I'm pretty sure I saw 2 yawning the first 30 seconds of the video. I would guess that at least some of her lack of enthusiasm was due to the anxiety of being recorded - at least, I hope so! And maybe that was Christian's partner's problem, too. I sure hate being put on the spot like that, with or without being recorded!