Last week students were given a homework task to produce a weekly time table and enter their class details. The teacher discovered when correcting it that many students did not know how to produce a timetable on the computer. Learning about students' prior knowledge on the use of Word for Windows features, prompted the teacher to instruct her stuedents on how to insert a table in a Word document. This was not stipulated in her weekly planner, but she decided to dedicate an hour to teach her students this skill.
The students in this class share 24 netbooks with the other Grade 6 classes (which will soon change to each student having an individual netbook). The teacher sent the classroom "tech" (a student who is in charge of distributing the netbooks and has been trained to fix minor issues) to distribute the netbooks to the class. This part of the lesson caused a bit of disruption as students were going in and out of the room and the slow loading of the computers delayed the beginning of the lesson. Some students were imapatient at their desks wanting to start. This can be easily avoided by having the computers turned on and loaded before the lesson actually starts to minimise time wasting and anxiety in students. Another issue that this lesson presented was the lack of a projector or an interactive whiteboard for the teacher to demonstrate and model the steps. The teacher had to describe each step, E.g. "go to the tab that reads insert, click on the word table, select..." The problem with this was that a simple step demanded so much explaining that half the students kept raising their hands and asking for help as they were not able to find what they needed.
As I reflect on this particular part of the lesson I know that there is room for improvement. An interactive white-board would have made a big difference. Students could have watched the steps and followed them a lot easier than having to listen to the instructions. However, I noticed that as they were eager and focused on the lesson, the level of engagement was high.
Another important thing I noticed today was that students knowledge of simple things was quite poor and they needed help for things I would not have expected. It was hard between the teacher and myself to attend to everyone. Hands kept going up because students couldn't align the text to the left, couldn't choose the same font for the whole table, didn't know how to undo a step or how to align a title in the centre of the page.
The real issue was when the students finished their table and it was time to print. The printers were not installed in the netbooks therefore the option was to save their work, however the students couldn't save to the network. The only option was to save to their USBs so that the teacher could print them from her laptop. However the teacher couldn't read the students' USBs due to the configuration of the netbooks.
This whole process took about 20 minutes and it developed in frustration. The teacher became more and more irritated as the next student came and her laptop did not read the USB and the students became frustrated as well because they couldn't see the finished product. The teacher couldn't solve the issue, the ICT coordinator was away on camp and the technicians were not at the school on that day.
As I tried to help the teacher and thought about what to do, I realised that printing is not necessary all of the time. The students achieved the goal of learning how to insert a table in a Word document and how to fill it out. The printing frustration can be overcome by creating a class Wiki and displaying the work there.
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