Reflection on Tech-Club Experience for 10/23
Our first day working with Liz at the Longfellow Tech Club was great. I spent the first half of the semester doing Book Club for EDU 331 at Longfellow with 3rd and 4th graders and I'm interested to see how my Tech Club experience differs from that one. I participated in Book Club by myself, with no other MSU students to work with. I'm excited to have support from fellow MSU students. And, we gathered to discuss our book in the gym where all of the other students who attended were playing and doing homework. Sometimes Book Club participants became distracted by the kindergardeners running around and the noise of the gym. I think that Tech Club participants will be able to focus better in the computer lab where there are not so many distractions.
We helped the students with homework for the first half-hour of our time at Longfellow, and then followed the kids and the MSU students who were in the first cohort down to the computer lab. For the first 10 minutes of the half-hour in the computer lab was spent working on a program called "Dance Mat Typing" which helps them practice finding home-row and basic typing skills. Then they began working on their project, in which they researched birds. The MSU students in the first cohort had intended for the Longfellow students to have researched a bird online, copied and pasted an image from the internet onto a Word document, and type a few short sentences describing the bird. At the end, everyone's final product was compiled into a little book. The idea was for this project to be spread out over the whole 6 weeks. However, Haley and I worked with two students who hadn't been to Tech Club before, and we had to rush them through the whole 6-week process in one half an hour. It became clear that constant improvisation will be necessary due to the nature of the after school program in which many students will be leaving early, or only there on certain days. The fact that all students will be at different levels was an issue in Book Club as well, but I see it as great practice for implementing differentiation tactics.
Liz, the Tech Club coordinator at Longfellow, gave us a few guidelines about how we should conduct Tech Club. With her help, Lane, Haley and I decided that we would do a similar project with the students. We are going to have the students research a type of weather or weather pattern and similarly, teach them how to copy and paste an image from the internet, give them some practice typing a few short sentences and have them print out their final product at the end to be compiled into a little book about weather. Before today, this wouldn't have seemed to me like enough to fill a 6-week program. But after seeing how complicated it was for the students go back and forth between a word document and an internet page, not to mention typing a simple sentence, I have realized what a huge task navigating computers can be for them. I think that this amount of work will be just right.
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