This is great!
Those were the words that kept running through my mind as I sat in on my first observation of a Senior English class in the first week of my professional experience placement. The students were working in groups and each given a factor (social, religious, racial) in which to gather some information about in relation to the context and submit it into an online area (blog) the teacher had set up for the class to use. The classroom laptops were handed out and were about 3 laptops to a group of about 5 or 6 students. However, there were one or two laptops which were not working and so one group only had 2 laptops to do their research on.
Now from my experience of when I was in high school doing this sort of task in class my thoughts were that not much work was going to get done as they didn’t have enough students researching.
As I came back around to see what each group was doing, I saw 3 students in that group with their phones out. So of course my reaction was to walk over to tell them off. But then as I got closer, I noticed what was on the screens of the 3 students phones, journal articles! The students saw that they couldn’t use the classroom resources to complete their research to contribute to the task, so to make sure they were pulling their weight in the group, they retrieved credible and useful articles of research on the context their group was given by using their phones.
Now many people might say ‘big deal I do that all the time’, but for me it was just a moment where I realized how education is heading in terms of all kinds of technology being a useful resource in the classroom.
It was a great thing to experience and I will not soon forget it.
jesseluque 