Blog Post 11

Skype Interview with Kathy Cassidy by Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange's skype interview with Canadian first grade teacher Kathy Cassidy focuses on how she used technology with her students, and it was interesting. Doctor Strange and a few of his students asked her about how she got started using technology in the classroom, how to protect students, and the advantages of using it, among other questions. Ms. Cassidy uses it quite a lot with her students, as she demonstrates in her video Little Kids...Big Potential. They use everything from computers to Nintendo DS, which you don't see often, if ever.

First, I think it's cool that she started teaching her kids about technology of her own initiative. When five computers were put into her classroom, instead of letting them sit in a corner, unused except to let kids play games, she found a way to incorporate them into the children's education. In most of the classes I've had, from elementary to high school, the computers in any of my classes had always gone unused or been a treat to play on if you had completed an assignment early. If you have a resource, technology or not, you should ask yourself how it can be used to help your students.

In the interview, Ms. Cassidy described one of the advantages of students having a blog; it gives them an audience. I can see how this would be good, since it might drive the students to improve, to do better, for their audience to see their progress. If I did this with high school students, I can see them just copying each other's work, so they don't have to do it themselves. I wouldn't want to have to make personalized assignments, so maybe I could pick a single student once or twice a week to do a blog assignment.

Something Ms. Cassidy pointed out in the interview really made me pause. "Word processors and spreadsheets are no longer technology, that's technology 20 years ago." (I'm paraphrasing, I think.) That really is twenty years ago! And look at how much technology has advanced in such a short time. Just think about what was considered technology hundreds of years ago. Once, gunpowder was considered technology. Plows (the cattle driven kind) were considered technology at some time. So years ago, when classrooms started getting computers, people were thinking, "We'll never use this, what can we do with a word processor? Kids have pens, paper, typewriters. We don't need this." We use word processors a lot now. And while it's not obsolete,  there is a whole lot more we could be using than just a computer's basic function.

Here's a question posed by Doctor Strange: where should people start with technology? Ms. Cassidy's answer: go with what you're interested in. It could be video, photography, writing, anything. That would be a good way to get students who aren't interested to give technology a second chance--giving them open assignments that let them explore technology on their own grounds. Of course, it would have to be educational in nature, and their assignments would need to reflect them learning something, but it would hopefully get them interested.

Finally, a topic addressed twice in the interview--protecting your students from others and keeping students from finding questionable content on the internet. Ms. Cassidy taught her students to never use their last names on the internet, never post photos of themselves, and when she posts photos of her students she never puts names to faces. Her answer to keeping students from finding things they shouldn't was to have her blog as a hub with links to everything they needed to get to on it, and instructions to never click on the shiny banners on pages.

But high school students are a lot less easily led around--soon as they get on a computer, I imagine they'll be a lot less interested in the assignment and more interested in doing what they want to do (I'm the same way, after all). Schools around here have a censor that block certain websites, but I think that's more a hindrance to education than anything. In the end, unless you're standing over their shoulder monitoring them the entire time, there's no guarantee they won't wander into something they shouldn't. The best answer, I think, is to have a little faith in them and a clear deadline for their assignment. So they know if they goof off, they may not have time to turn it in on time.