The Technological Classroom

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

Hi! I am a fourth grade teacher at Cassell Elementary in San Jose. I have 33 fourth-graders who all receive free or reduced lunch. Many of my students speak English as a second language. The elementary school where I teach has students who are at least 2 years behind their grade reading level. My students are just now starting to realize how far behind they really are. Our school has very limited funds so things like computers and technology are some of the last things we can afford. I am attempting to alleviate this problem by bringing my laptop to class and using a projector to show students how to move through Windows and PowerPoint. It has been a great tool to expose them to both science and social studies. It is so important that not just children growing up in middle class areas have access to technology. One tool that would help us document and reflect on our learning is a digital camera. We have been working hard at science all year and would love the opportunity to document all of our experiments. To show how we move from forming a hypothesis to experimentation and finally to recording and analyzing our data would really put a face on all of the work we do in class. The best way to do this is through taking pictures on a digital camera, printing, and displaying them via slide shows in class. We have been using PowerPoint and slide shows for social studies and science all year and this would fit right in with what we are doing. Our projector is a great way to teach and reflect our work. When I put the information on the screen, it is engaging and interesting to my students. This works out especially well for my English Language Learners. The pictures that we can put up on the projector make assignments a lot easier for my students to understand. They can get big ideas from the pictures instead of the text. In social studies we study California history. The history of California has been influenced greatly by immigration. Many of my students are immigrants and they identify with the stories of those who came before them and those people we read about in our text book. Next year I would like to have the opportunity to let my students tell their own stories: how they arrived in California, where they came from, and for what reasons they decided to come. I believe that this type of project would be both powerful and motivational for my students. The digital camera would serve two purposes. One would be for us to take pictures of our science accomplishments over the course of they year. It would be terrific to help them reflect on their experiments, their hypotheses, and what they might do differently if they were able to do the experiments again. The second purpose would be as an aid to help the students tell their own histories. They could take pictures of their families, their homes, and their neighborhoods. This way they could see how they tie into California history. Many of my students are new immigrants to California and their story could be compared and contrasted with the stories of immigrants in our book. Please give my students a chance to make sure that science and social studies really connect with them. Help us to make sure that technology isn\'t just found in wealthy classrooms and that everyone can have access to a modern education.