Blog 1: The Unanswered Question

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- The Unanswered Question


    This year teaching has shown me a lot about how education at an elementary level has changed significantly. At times, I find that this is for the better. However, sometimes I wonder if we are benefiting or hurting the upcoming generations. As you have probably seen a couple times if you read through my History of Life as well as my All About Me Blog, I recently taught STEM and grade 7/8 soccer academy within my local catholic school board. 

    STEM was not a program that was taught when I was in elementary school. The program focused on developing research skills, creating innovative thinkers, and progressively teaching students how to code. Students were quickly learning how to code a robot to move where they wanted it to go, say what they wanted it to say, and so on. 

    In my most recent teaching position, each of the grade 7 and 8 students were given a Chromebook in September. Most, if not all, tasks were done virtually, while in the classroom. The justification for this was that the world is evolving into a technology based world. Students are being developed to be able to succeed when they get to high school and university. However, at the closest high school to the middle school, the students were not given Chromebooks. In fact, they were only able to use laptops in the classroom if they were to bring their own. In this instance, many of the students were not fortunate enough to be able to have their own laptop to bring to their school. Even when using the Chromebooks in class, I noticed that the students weren't using any punctuation, despite the endless tools embedded in Google Docs. I noticed that they would research an algebra answer on an algebra generator so that they wouldn't do any actual thinking themselves. I couldn't help but think to myself, are we helping these students by showing them that in reality, they could just use the internet to find the answer? Are we hurting them by taking away that innovative, creative thinker? When I had them do writing assignments, on paper, some of the writing was illegible. For a grade 7 and/or 8, I found this horrifying. 

The question becomes: 
Is technology in the classroom helping or hurting our students? 


Join me as I try to understand more about technology in the classroom.

Comments

  1. Megan ShawJuly 11, 2022 at 10:23 AM

    Hi Giulia,

    I enjoyed reading your first blog entry! I am also a teacher at a STEM school and this past year I taught Grade 7 Humanities. Like your school, my students have to bring their own laptops to class to complete work. At my school, we experienced similar problems to you like students not punctuating their writing correctly despite endless tools. As a staff, we ultimately had a conversation about when is technology meaningful and when is it just replacing traditional strategies that work. For example, math has traditionally been completed on paper for thousands of years and it has worked successfully. So, do we need to use technology to teach math? It was an interesting reflective process to think about all of the truly meaningful ways we could use technology at our school.

    Megan

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jeevan MannJuly 14, 2022 at 3:55 PM

    Hi Giulia,

    Your inquiry question is one that I too have often considered in my teaching practice. There have been many times when students have not used their technology for the intended research, but instead get distracted watching Youtube videos, playing games or going on various social media platforms. I am interested in what your research will show regarding students and technology throughout the next five weeks!

    Jeevan

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ashley PinsonneaultAugust 20, 2022 at 8:46 AM

    Hi Giulia,
    I loved reading through your first blog post! I believe that in both of our blogs we are investigating similar questions. I do believe that technology can be of great assistance, although I also believe it is truly starting to effect our younger learners writing skills. That is one of the first questions I talk about in my blog. I look forward to reading more of your posts on this topic!
    Best,
    Ashley

    ReplyDelete

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