Technology Lesson -March 26th

On March 26th, I taught a lesson in the computer lab, drawing on what we had already completed in class.

The lesson was to learn how to copy and paste something from one document to another, and also practice editing on the computer. Our computer lab is not equipped with Microsoft word, so we had to do it with word pad.

Because of the limitations of our computer lab, I was not able to analyze the work done from this lesson, but I was tracking their talking, and since my primary goal in the inquiry question is to decrease the amount of talking done by the focus students especially, but also in the class as a whole.

When I first looked over the talking for this lesson, I was really discouraged. One of the main things that I am tracking is the class total times talking out during the lesson. At the beginning of my inquiry, they were all easily over twenty, a few were around 40. But since then it had seriously decreased, with just one more time over twenty until this lesson.

This lesson was not up to my record highs by any means, with a total of 21, but it definitely wasn't as low as I had hoped either. I attribute this to the fact that it was in the computer lab, not our natural classroom, and so I automatically lose some control there, and then I lose more by the fact that they have a computer in front of them and are having to listen while having this very distracting object in front of them.

Still a huge improvement over my averages the first few weeks, and I think it was pretty good for being in the computer lab.

However, my main victory with this lesson came later, when I looked closer at the data.

I may have had 21 times talking out as a whole in the classroom... but only four of them came from my 7 main focus students.

One was from N, who has been diagnosed with ADHD, and just one time shouting out in a lesson is a victory for him. The other 3 came from G, who was somehow placed next to his best friend (I should have noticed this and moved him, but by the time I caught this mistake, they had both started working, and I didn't want them to have to start over) so that is understandable, it was unusually high for him.

But the other 4 (one was absent)... didn't talk out AT ALL... in the computer lab... with computers in front of them. I was amazed! Here I am feeling discouraged about my class talking times, but the truth of the matter is that of the 6 kids present who I really wanted to improve their talking out behaviors, 5 of them have improved immensely (and the one other was next to a friend, and understandably suffered), and were able to focus and listen to instruction without talking at all.

This also demonstrates that the extra talking in this lesson was from my "general population" who were understandably more excited because they have a new location and computers in front of them, but they are typically quiet, and so their extra talking is a non-issue.

As far as the instructional part of the lesson went, most of the students were on task, and understood where the mistakes were and tried to fix them. The biggest problem that I encountered is that they were not sure how to fix the mistakes once they found them, and would accidentally misspell a word that they knew was misspelled, etc.

Overall, against my initial feelings about this lesson, I count it as a success based on the behavior of my focus students.