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The Lab Works tab above is one way I try to organize the older grades' activities in the lab. Our younger grades, however, don't have their own pages on Lab Works. So, what are we doing in these grades?
In general, the goal for grades TK-3 is for students to become familiar with basic applications and concepts used in computing. My goal is to make their use of these tools transparent to the tasks they will be trying to accomplish in later years using various technologies. Referring to the list on the left, we concentrate on the basic skills found in Standards 1-4, and begin to touch on skills that will be later needed to meet Standards 5 and 6.
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Technology Standards
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TK/Kindergarten
In Kindergarten and TK, students are developing their small motor skills, which is why they do drawing and printing activities, and learn the alphabet, phonics, and basic communication in class. In the lab, we are also focused on small motor skills, particularly the use of the two-button mouse.
At the beginning of the year, we do computer games that require clicking, and drag-and-drop. We also do a lot of computer drawing. This soon cements their ability to manipulate the two mouse buttons easily because dragging a drawing tool around the screen requires one button, while the other button is used to erase lines. It may seem like a lot of drawing at times, but repetition of proper skills develops good habits over the long haul. Later on, we use a website called Starfall to help them to not only learn to interact with screen information through clicked menus, but also to use occasional keyboard input - and all this while playing learning games that develop their skills in phonics, listening, and following sequences of information. Other sites, such as those from PBS and Dr. Seuss, are also utilized at times to develop these skills. After this, we move on to a program using Blue's Clues characters that involves much more autonomy on the part of the students. This is a "sandbox"-style activity in that the students can go in and do things pretty much any way they want to do it. The basic scenario within the program is that they are building various art projects using a wide variety of on-screen materials and techniques that will be collected and displayed at an Art Show. Much of their development of sequential understanding is brought to the fore in this extensive program, and it becomes a favorite of many of the kids. If there's time in the school year, and the students show an aptitude, we are sometimes able to go beyond these activities and begin addressing other sequential tech activities such as in Pivot, which is a basic animation program, or in using our Bee-bots, which are simple robots.
Second Grade
In Second Grade, we see more maturity in basic skills and a desire to expand on them. Knowledge of the keyboard is our first priority of the school year. It is important that students know where the keys are on the keyboard in terms of which letters are in which row, which letters are adjacent to other letters, and so on. Because their hands are growing and finger dexterity is increasing, I expect them to regularly use two hands and multiple fingers to find the keys, but we are still not formally using Touch Typing techniques at this age.
In order to cement their knowledge of key positions on the keyboard, we play several memory games eventually culminating for a couple weeks using a keyboard layout they create in Inspiration. It's also a spelling competition: I give them word clues and they have to drag the correct keyboard letters of the word to the top of their screen to spell the answer. We have a competition between sides of the lab to see which team can get the most correct answers. It is always a close competition, and they have a lot of fun, but they are also kinesthetically learning their key positions as we play. At the end of every challenge, they have to return their letters to their correct positions which further reinforces their knowledge of where each letter is located. The lab software allows me to oversee each of their desktops from my console, so I can check which students are struggling to locate the letters on the keyboard. [Standards 1, 3, and 4] Another way we remember the keys is to create mnemonic "stories" based on the sequence of letters in each row and using vivid imagery to help retain it. For example, popular ones from years past are "Queen Wanda Eats Rotten Tomato Yogurt Upside-down In Our Palace" (QWERTYUIOP) and "A Silly Donkey Finds Gold, Happily Jumps (and) Kicks (the) Leprechaun" (ASDFGHJKL). We're still trying to come up with a good one for the bottom row of the keyboard (ZXCVBNM). [Standards 3 and 6] Keyboard knowledge in this day of touchscreens is still as important as ever, even though the value of Touch Typing may be becoming less prominent compared to past days when making mistakes cost us a lot more productivity time - when mistakes meant we had to re-type entire pages. Touchscreens, in fact, make Touch Typing almost impossible, as there are no markers one usually finds on the F and J keys to locate one's hands without looking. Furthermore, the size of portable devices is allowing people to type more and more with their thumbs, or to use swipe gestures to type. Perhaps one day these will be considered the "standard" form of entry. Again, knowing the positions of the letters on our legacy QWERTY keyboard layout is still the most important knowledge regardless of which direction modern technology heads in the future, and as long as society continues to use standard keyboards, we will continue to make this a priority here early on. Continuing the use of keyboards in 2nd Grade, we also begin using Microsoft Word. We spend time with the fun things in word processing, such as fonts, also learning a little about typography along the way as we learn what makes the different fonts unique, and how they would be used in different kinds of documents, such as signs, poems, letters, and stories; all of which we learn to properly create and format using Word. [Standards 3 and 4] As we approach the end of the year, we enter into a new realm: programming. We use a program developed at MIT called Scratch to help students learn how to take control of elements on the screen and make them move under their control. This is the first real fruit of working on sequencing throughout the K-2 years as the kids develop procedures to test and accomplish tasks I lay out for them. Scratch uses snap-together visual elements to quickly create program segments, and students are exposed to basic programming structures in a kid-friendly environment. See the Scratch website for more information about this program used by students all over the world. [Standards 1, 3, and 6] Throughout Second Grade, students are becoming more and more proficient and confident in their interactions with technology, and they are engaging more of their own creativity in solving problems and communicating ideas.
Summary of K-3 Activities
Students in the Kindergarten through Third Grades experience a termendous amount of growth in their lives in interacting with their world. In the technology arena, we expect students to go from knowing very little about computers and technology to having some real facility in using technology tools such as keyboarding and word processing, image creation, visual organizers, and slide presentations. They also develop some facility with the rudiments of robotics and programming. It is a very exciting time!
Incidentally, the things I've laid out here are the highest priority benchmarks I want the students to master in each year from my perspective (technology) but these are not the only things we do in the lab. I've not included what the various classroom teachers add to the mix because every teacher has a variety of projects each year connected to the units they're covering. The context of what I want to see accomplished in these projects from the technology side still follows the goals I've stated above in each grade's section, regardless of whether the project is one I or another teacher has originated. Ultimately, I want students to use technology tools transparently, so that the project itself is the focus with the tools merely making the attainment of the project's goals that much easier, more efficient, and of higher quality than they would be if we didn't make use of them. Links to Old Lab Works Pages
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First Grade
In First Grade, we continue to practice good habits. The first requirement of the year is for first graders to learn how to remember and correctly enter their username and password each time they come in. They have to be able to do this on three consecutive days of class. When they succeed, they qualify as "Experts" and are then able to lend their expertise to their classmates who are still trying to master the skill. This process usually takes about four weeks before every student in the class can do it without assistance. [Standards 1 and 2]
After that, we spend some time again drawing with Paint.net, but now we're using more tools that will be useful further down the road in their schoolwork, such as the shape tools. Also, the expectation for what should be included in their diagrams is higher. Many of our drawings are meant to pull out and deepen their understanding of seasons, holidays, and facial expressions, for example. [Standards 1, 2, 3, and 4] Following that, we focus on developing facility with a graphic organizing tool called Inspiration. This program offers a number of ways that information can be organized visually, and we spend some time learning how to use it. Many of the conceptual ideas that first graders are learning in their regular classroom are also integrated into the use of Inspiration, such as sequence and comparisons. [Standards 1 and 3, and 6] One of the basic skills that all students need is a strong understanding of sequence, and First Grade has proven to be the best time to start focusing on this. Inspiration helps students to visually lay out, for example , the important moments in a story, or to describe the sequence of actions they go through each day to get ready to go to school. Later on, higher-level procedural thinking will build on this basic skill, and we practice it using this fun program. Another piece of technology mentioned under Kindergarten that helps develop basic procedural skill is our set of Bee-bots. These simple robotic devices move slowly around on the floor or tabletop and can be programmed with sequences of very simple commands to move forward and back, or turn right and left. Student teams in First Grade are given problems to solve with their Bee-bots that require their predicting what steps will be necessary to get their Bee-bot to its various goals along a path. This is a lot of fun and extremely useful skill development. [Standards 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6] As the students start writing down their steps, they begin to see a simple need for a computer program that accepts their information in an organized way. We combine a couple of things together here: word processing with a simple text editor and Inspiration bubbles with single commands that can be dragged into new combinations. We use the text editor to "save" the best arrangement and the graphic organizer to quickly try out different sequences of steps. As you can see, we're starting to develop some rudimentary "programming" skills here, one of the 21st Century skills that is finally being taken seriously once again, along with some organizational skills. We also do the same thing with the stories we outlined from before. After this, we take some time to start firming up the students' understanding of the keyboard. My expectation for First Graders is that they begin to use two hands on the keys and that they start to demonstrate that they have an idea of which keys are on the left side of the keyboard and which are on the right, to correspond to which hand should be pressing the key. No one-handed, one-finger typing allowed! [Standards 3 and 4] In the final trimester, we're trying to strengthen sequential understanding by using one of the school's favorite programs: Pivot Stickfigure Animator. This free program is amazingly useful, not only teaching basic stop-motion animation techniques (which is basically: place a figure, take a picture, move something a little bit, take another picture, and so on), but also putting into practice some very broad elements that will carry them through their school careers, such as detailed sequencing, and trying to convey meaning from visual information. We also are able to re-integrate their drawing skills as Pivot allows pictures drawn by the students to be incorporated as backgrounds into their animations. This is very exciting for them to be able to accomplish. [Standards 2, 3, 4, and 6] Throughout the First Grade year, students are acquiring an ever-growing toolkit of skills and understanding, and are able to share their expertise as well as their productive output with their peers. I see a lot of sharing of creative ideas as we work on things together. Sometimes they will try to copy what I am doing as an example, sometimes they'll follow their own paths. It's a delight to see one child discover what another has created and then say, "I'm going to do that, too!" Again, with the tool use becoming transparent, students can get right to expressing their own ideas confidently without being slowed down by a lack of facility.
Third Grade
As in First Grade, the beginning of Third Grade requires a new skill regarding network log-ons. In Third Grade, students must begin using their own individual usernames and passwords. (Prior to this, all students used the same username and password to log on.) The necessity of respecting password secrecy is also discussed. [Standard 1 and 2]
In Third Grade, we focus on the next most used application in Office suites, slide presentation. We spend lots of time focusing on different elements of Microsoft PowerPoint. Our first assignment uses the most obvious elements: multiple slide creation, text entry, page formatting, embedding images, and simple animation control. Later on, we do assignments that make use of the Shapes menu, add complex animations and transitions, create self-running slide shows, and extract slides as their own images. All of these skills lead to a transparent facility with PowerPoint that they will be needing from now on, and that can also be carried over to similar slide presentation programs available elsewhere. [Standards 3 and 4] Another skill that is being built in 3rd Grade is the ability to seek out and make use of information in a variety of contexts. This requires search skills, using both traditional sources and online sources. We spend some time learning about the basic search process using search engines, comparing them to traditional methods, and how to use good keywords to find information. We also spend some time learning how to "read" web pages for useful information. Because our focus in 3rd grade is on slide presentations, we transfer what our research finds onto slides and organize them into interesting presentations. [Standards 3, 4, and 5] We also spend some time getting more detailed in the use of word processing, especially in generating multi-paragraph documents. The proper use of the Enter key at the end of paragraphs, and the use of both Backspace and Delete keys is expected. Formatting paragraphs with proper spacing, margin controls, indention, etc., is also expected in this year. [Standards 3 and 4] In the past, we've taken another step in making presentations and created podcasts as our culminating project for Third Grade, with slides and narrations recorded by the students. This is a comprehensive activity that requires word processing to write a script, information gathering and organization, photo editting, slide layout, and sound recording. It is an experience they will continue to use in the future as their audience widens. [Standards1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6] Scratch is also used now to create presentations. In this context, the programming elements involving page layout and text organization are worked on from the perspective of programming them in a time sequence. This is a challenging part of the year, but one that contributes greatly to their sequential, procedural understanding. [Standards 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6]
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