Robin, This kind of feedback is priceless! Thank you so much for taking the time to write.
On Friday 04 April 2008 7:18:52 pm you wrote: > Hello everyone, > > My name is Robin Lerche, and I am a kindergarten teacher at a charter > school in the South Bronx (I'm using my mom's e-mail to be able to write to > this list). This is my first year as a head teacher, so I am still getting > a feel for things, but as of right now, things are going very well. My mom, > Carol, bought four XOs to have in my class as a center, and for the past > week she has been in my class teaching my kids how to use them. I thought I > would write about how it went. Let me just give a little rundown of the > kids in my class: There are 20 5- and 6-year olds, but I think their > experience could easily be applied to a 1st grade class as well, since all > of them except two are reading on at least a first grade level, and most of > them have very good handwriting, so good fine motor skills. > > First of all, let me say that they certainly are durable! Of course, > Karissa, while trying to take a picture of my reading group, dropped it on > the floor, and it was quite fine afterwards. She's not very tall, but still > > :-) They were all very intrigued by the rabbit ears and the little people > : on > > the back, and several of them incorporated the logo into their pictures > during writing time, which was cute. > > They really liked the computers. They were so excited when they went to use > them, they couldn't wait until they started up to start pressing all the > buttons. Each group had four kids at a time, and my mom was constantly > supervising them so if they had any problems, she could troubleshoot. Which > happened quite a lot, as they are very impatient. Their main problem was > that they didn't want to wait for the programs to come up; when it didn't > pop up immediately, they would click on something else to try it, which of > course made it start even slower, and so they got very frustrated and my > mom had to close out everything before they would be able to try again. > They loved taking pictures of everything, but some of them had trouble > getting the mouse to sit well enough on the little button to take the > picture, especially when they were trying to do it semi-upside down so that > the subject of the picture was looking at the screen and the taker was not > (it would be great if the picture was taken no matter where on the screen > you clicked). However, they all got very into the chat feature, though > there was really only one group that was patient enough to learn the > orientation of the keyboard in order to write messages. The other ones just > got excited when they made something come up on the other screen, and > pretending to "type" really fast (one of my kids kept saying, "Oh look, I > got e-mail!"). A few of them figured out how to do the puzzle, and they > liked messing around with Paint for a few minutes, but their fine motor > skills weren't good enough to get anything recognizable out of it, and they > were especially frustrated with the difficulty of switching colors. They > really liked Tux because of the sounds and the stamps; unfortunately, my > mom said it didn't work on the new release. But ultimately, even that > didn't hold their interest for that long, because they couldn't really draw > pictures. They loved the memory game and the cartoon builder, but there > weren't enough pre-built images for them to explore for long. > > Some of them understood pretty well how to open the computers and get them > started, but less of them understood that they needed to close out their > applications and shut them down before they closed them. I could see that > this could be a big classroom management issue unless they were either > completely independent on the computers, or like me, the teacher had a > full-time person in the room whose job it was to troubleshoot. Sadly, since > I don't have the luxury of having such a full-time person in the classroom > (my mom does have to go home), I will not be continuing to use these in my > classroom, at least not this year. I don't think that at this age, it would > be a useful tool to have the whole class on at the same time, since they > need really concrete, hands-on methods to figure things out, rather than > more abstract things on the computer. I do think this could be a great way > to reteach concepts to a small group, especially with math concepts like > patterning if there was a program for this sort of thing. My mom also says > that a lot of the issues I experienced in class are probably going to get > better with new releases, so maybe next year we can try again! I wish I had > a full time person in the room to handle them because they really did have > fun and they will be sad to see them go. > > Sincerely, > Robin _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
