From First to Last - My Journey with Tech Hardware

Time - 1985, setting - dorm room in Chapel Hill, NC.  

Because I was fortunate to have a dad who loved gadgets and was the epitome of the yet-to-be-named "early adopter," I was the object of envy and curiosity because I had a typewriter that would remember the last 50 or so characters that you had typed. If you knew pretty quickly that you wanted to delete or change something, you could do it without the use of liquid paper!  Aha! 

Avatar sitting at a typewriter
Photo from Pixabay

Time - Fall of 1990,  Setting - my science classroom in a rural SC classroom with no air conditioning

I somehow got my hands on a floppy disk from WRAL in Raleigh, NC.  This disc had weather forecasting backgrounds and modules for science students to use in modeling forecasting.  As an 8th-grade science teacher, I inquired as to the availability of this so-called LCD projector and it turned out we had one at our school, but no teacher had ever used it so no one could help me set it up.  I fiddled and fiddled - after all, I had taken computer programming in college (back when you had to go to one lab because no one had a computer of their own and the printer still used the green and white striped paper that had to be threaded onto the printer).  Voila!  I was once again the object of great interest as teacher after teacher lined up in my doorway to see what the new young whippersnapper was doing in her classroom.  

various weather possibilities in clip art fashion
art from Pixabay

1991 - 1994 - Urban middle school classroom

Like a Boss using one Apple IIe with twenty-five students playing Oregan Trail or Where in the World is Carmen San Diego!

1995 - 2022 - School and District Administration

Using computers for office work and presentations

2022 - 2023 - Retired Rookie back in the classroom in Suburban Elementary School

After what I must admit was a grueling first year back in the classroom library full time with a heavy teaching load, I finally agreed to open the library for the summer SOAR program this past summer.  The administrator who was running the program had already ordered books and equipment for us to use so I was the recipient of whatever she had ordered.  The only piece of equipment she had ordered turned out to be a document camera.  When I left the classroom in 1994 I used an overhead projector, so this twist on that idea seemed old, yet also new and intriguing. The document camera may not be the flashiest of the new hardware (hey, I admitted in the title of this post that I was now in last place when it came to mastering the new gizmos), but it has allowed me to do a few important things. 

Last year I became pretty good at using youtube videos of books (vooks?) to project the illustrations while I muted the video and slowed down the speed so I could read to the students.  But there was one type of book I shied away from last year - the books with no words.  After getting that document camera, I used it to project these wordless books so that we can talk as a class about the author/illustrator's purpose and the action in the books.  One of my favorite books from my Children's Materials class with Valerie Byrd Fort was The Red Book and one of my favorite books from Junior Library Guild has been Field Trip to Volcano Island.

 

Book Cover of The Red Book by Barbara Lehman

Book Cover of Field Trip to Volcano Island by John Hare

I am not sure how I could have done a whole class "read aloud" of a wordless book without it - because there really are not a lot of "vooks" of wordless books and if there are any, they move way too fast, not allowing for examination and exploration.  Another genre that I am excited to use the document camera to highlight is the seek and find books - my two new favorites are Spot, the Cat and Spot and Dot which (Kirkus Reviews, 2016) rightly claims "make investigating the wordless spreads both a challenge and a joy."  I must also say that after reading this week's materials, I also feel good about the fact that with the doocument camera to project the books, my students are not exposed as much to the marketing wing of youtube's curation of suggested videos that litter the right-hand side of the video and my students don't have to watch the ads for Grammarly that always seem to come before the "vooks" that I usually use!  Finally, I have used the document camera to study Caldecott Winner illustrations and to project illustrations of books that are not popular and therefore do not have ebooks or "vooks" available.

Book Cover of Spot, the Cat by Henry Cole

Here is a link to the Document Camera I use!

The Technology Learning Model that most applies to me and the document camera is the TIM.  I have seen the RAT before, so I wanted to focus on the model that was new to me and that just frankly both resonated with me and gave me so much information I could latch onto.  The TIM, at least as much as I was able to understand it, is informative rather than judgemental and firmly places me on the entry-level and as a rookie, I am at peace with that.  Do I want to progress along the spectrum?  Absolutely I do.  But as (The Technology Integration Matrix, 2019) describes the entry level, I am simply using the document camera right now to "deliver curriculum content to the students."  As simple as the document camera is, I feel confident that I can move both down and to the right in the very rich spectrum that TIM provides.  I do believe that I am at the  (The Technology Integration Matrix, 2019) referenced "Constructive learning environment" as I am attaching the wordless books to the students' prior language arts and reading learning with content such as setting, characters, action, plot, etc.  The way the TIM model allows you to click "more" in each box and find further descriptive information and the way that the information provided is user-friendly and understandable is what makes this my favorite model (The Technology Integration Matrix, 2019).

References

Kirkus reviews. (2016, January 20). Kirkus. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/henry-cole/spot-the-cat/

The technology integration matrix. (2019). TIM. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/matrix/