Our school is a low-income school with the majority of our students on free and reduced lunch, and many who live with extended families in government housing. The majority of my students don’t have a traditional family home life. Many of my students have step parents and siblings. Some don’t have a father figure, and some are raised by grandparents. Due to these family structures, many of our students do not experience stable home lives. Because of this, their access to technology within the home is often minimal.
To expose students to technology opportunities, we embrace technology in our school and do our best to integrate it into our daily school life.
Many of these students don’t have access to a computer at home, let alone the internet; therefore we look for opportunities to bring technology to our students in a variety of ways.
My Project
“Where’s my phone?” Whether I was Googling the average length of a typical blue shark, setting a three minute timer, or hearing the Spanish word for ‘frost’, I use my phone in the classroom every day. When my students come in every morning I have feel-good, get pumped-up music playing (mostly for me). During my Spanish class, I play Spanish Flamenco music while students are doing hands-on activities.
As a Special Education teacher, I try to encourage students to self-advocate, to speak up when they don’t understand something in class.
What ‘cooler’ way to confess, in front of all their peers, that they don’t know how to spell the word ‘courageous’ than to access some cutting-edge technology.
Having an Amazon Echo will encourage curiosity, a life-skill, about learning everything there’s to know. I hope students will be more willing to ask for definitions or synonyms, to basic words. They could say, “I just wanted to use Alexa.” As a lifetime learner, I often think to myself, random questions, “What’s the population of Hawaii?” Alexa will answer most, civic, geographical and historical questions that pop up during a lesson. We call these teachable moments. Even basic curious questions, such as, “What is the weather?” Or “Is this a leap year” will foster a curious mindset.
I am also requesting four touch pads, these will hook up to the Echo wirelessly and will be used as signaling devices to play review games before a test, with the students in small groups. Alexa could also double-check our work when adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators.
The extension cord is obviously, so I can plug in the Echo and have it in a centralized location in my classroom.
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