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Alice Treuth said it's fun to work on laptops in her fourth-grade class at St. Francis de Sales Catholic School because she doesn't have to write.
Sigh.
An even more ironic update:
On the other side of the class, Michael Vogel raised his hand for help. A red squiggly line appeared under a word on his screen indication to Vogel that what he typed was incorrect.
"Why is it wrong?" Vogel asked [the teacher].
4 comments:
There is more where that came from:
"Third-grade teacher Shirley Gargen said technology reaches children who are visual learners."
I think it is silly to pigeonhole pupils that way. I mean, who doesn't like to look at pictures first or prefer a visual illustration of some process to an elaborate description? The danger of this pigeonholing is that the alleged visual learner then gets absolved from having to engage verbal skills. Laziness masquerading as learning styles.
Mark, I read it as being a little bit of both. I look at the introduction of computers the same as the introduction of calculators--it's good for students to learn the mechanics of computation and handwriting.
Both my brothers had serious problems with fine motor skills in elementary school. Hand-written work was slow and exhausting; they had little energy left for content.
The older one had a very tough time making it through school. The younger one, who was 10 years younger, started working on computers in middle school. His problems were solved. He now works in high tech (and serves as my blogmaster).
Written worksheets force him to spend most of his time worrying about his handwriting, which makes the math go much more poorly.
Graph paper. One digit per square.
Sigh.
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