Technology Journal Blog 3

I observed Denise Fitzgerald teach a 4th Grade Science class in the World Wide Weather Video. Mrs. Fitzgerald has been teaching at the Healey School for eleven years and teaching fourth grade for six years. Her lesson included a weather cyber hunt. She walked the class through one example as a group. Mrs. Fitzgerald would call on a student and have that student come up to the front of the room and perform one step on the computer which was connected to the screen so the entire class could follow along. The class as a whole searched for the weather in I believe San Francisco, CA. They discussed how to find the weather for today, what the cloud coverage looked like and the record highs and lows for a specific month. Then Mrs. Fitzgerald broke the class down into groups of 2-3 based on language barrier. Her class is very diverse and not all students speak English fluently. Then she gave them instruction on performing the cyber hunt. The class had problems connecting to the internet so not all the laptops were working. She told the class while their group was waiting for a laptop they could work on their portfolios. She walked around the room to ensure all students were on track and doing something productive. The students were also to work on a slide in Kidpix relating to the region they researched weather for.
Mrs. Fitzgerald met the following Technology standards discussed in our textbook; 1) Basic operations and concepts, 2 Technology productivity tools, 4) Technology research tools. Mrs. Fitzgerald mentioned that her class was just learning to using laptops and explore the internet. The students were researching the weather in various regions and gathering information and then expected to make a slide displaying what they had learned about the weather in the region they had been assigned.
I thought she did a good job teaching. She involved numerous students during her explanation and they were all paying attention and wanting to be called on so they could go to the computer in the front of the class. I would have had the laptop which was connected to the overhead screen in a better location. It seemed like it was difficult to get to. I guess if money wasn’t an issue I would have had a laptop for every student. I thought Mrs. Fitzgerald handled the problem with the internet connectivity not working very well. She had a back of plan for the students to work on portfolios while they waited their turn. Technical issues exist and you always need to be prepared for the worst! Overall I thought she did a good job explaining the project, demonstrating and observing the hands on portion and the students were all well behaved and engaged in the activity.