Skills and Tools for the Future

What skills and tools am I going to carry with me into the future? Why did I choose these particular tools?

My students love to use computers. Recently when I was supervising them alone, eight of my kids were deep in concentration in front of a computer. There they sat, all in a row. Laughingly I said to them, "Hey, are you guys having a good time?" Only one of them answered. Looking at them clicking away on their key boards I noticed how content they seemed. I also saw what nice guys they are. The kids were using Starfall, pbskids.org. or Google. They Google all sorts of things, from trains to Listerine. Clearly computers are potentially a powerful teaching tool for my students.

The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives, along with several other web sites, would be wonderful for my class. Websites like these can teach concepts very cleanly and efficiently. While I am busily making PowerPoint slides using clumsy drawing tools, time is fleeing. What I am doing has already been done, and better than I can do it.

I have to keep searching the internet, investigating promising websites, and implementing immediately. What NLVM does with fractions is fantastic. It serves up the essence of fractions better than anything else I have ever seen.

Then there are blogs. I am considering communicating to my parents through a blog. The first five years I taught special education I sent home weekly newsletters. But as my job kept growing, this became harder and harder to do. The newsletters were discontinued in favor of email communications to specific parents. No doubt the families that I am serving would be interested in a blog about their child's week at school.

PowerPoint Shows have been an important part of my program for the past few years. I intend to investigate Apple’s Keynote Software. I have heard that it has powerful animations. The animations available in PowerPoint have been fine so far, but occasionally they seem inadequate. In teaching the children how to tell time, a clock with moving hands was needed, but using PowerPoint for this was painful and time consuming.

There will always be new software, materials, and approaches. At times keeping abreast of major developments in the computer world has seemed daunting. Other times it’s been fascinating. Twas ever thus. Sometimes we hang on white knuckled, other times we ride with our hands off the bar, arms straight up, with the wind in our hair. I guess I will always be somewhere in between. I appreciate how fascinating teaching and computers are but sometimes I have to brace myself for the wild ride.