REGINA — Last month, Grade 1 students in two small Saskatchewan towns located approximately 350 kilometres apart were linked — by technology and a father-daughter teaching team.
Gina Smith instructs 12 Grade 1 students in the Village of Glaslyn, Sask.
This fall — her third as a teacher — Gina proposed an idea to her father, Jerry Smith, who is a 33-year teaching veteran currently working at a school in Leader, Sask. Gina suggested that they instruct a math class simultaneously.
"My dad is a storyteller. When I was in elementary school, he was a teacher there and he would have storytelling time at noon hour. I always thought it'd be so neat for him to read to my class, but we're both teachers so we tend to work the same days," Gina said.
Last year, she entertained the idea of asking her dad to read stories to her class over the Internet, but she didn't follow through with the request.
That changed this September when Jerry began teaching Grade 1 math in addition to teaching special education students and math and science to Grade 4 students.
On Sept. 23, despite being 3 1/2 hours apart, students in Glaslyn connected with pupils in Leader via Skype — a computer program that allows users to video conference online. During the teaching experiment, the father-daughter duo also used SMART boards, which are connected to a computer and projector and act as large touch screens.
The lesson began with the kids introducing themselves.
"I had them come up close to the webcam so the video was up on the SMART board — they got a kick out of that," Gina said. "Then we asked each other counting questions. We counted how many students we had in each class, how many boys compared to how many girls and how many hands they had in their classroom. Then we tried to trick them and we asked how many feet they had."
The kids weren't counting long when they said: "We don't need to count them. We have the same number of feet as hands!"
"We compared the number of rooms in her school and ours so we ran around our school and they ran around their school and counted and then we came back and said who has more," Jerry said.
Gina thinks her students were more impressed with the technology than her father's class.
One of Gina's pupils asked in awe: "Were those students really there?"
"The principal has applied for a lot of grants so they have a green screen in their school and they can do video editing and things like that," Gina said of the Leader school.
The tech-savvy school in Leader also features SMART boards in every classroom.
"We're a showcase school in Saskatchewan with SMART board technology," Jerry said. "We've had teachers from around the province come to see how our setup works."
Despite a few technical difficulties, Jerry gave high marks to the exercise.
"We'll probably try it again when another lesson lends itself to that kind of thing," he said.
He recalled using Commodore 64 computers and is astounded by technology's rapid advancement.
"They weren't very good, but it was a start," he said.
Gina, 27, is also amazed at how quickly technology has evolved since she was in school. She credits her dad for his continued zest for learning.
"He's never too tired to try new things and he's always willing to learn another way of teaching," she said. "Now he's using a SMART board and a webcam and Skype — it's just amazing to see the exponential growth."
He's also no stranger to Skype.
"I Skype with another daughter who lives out of country quite often, but this was an experiment for Gina and I," Jerry said.
ore:http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Saskatchewan+teaching+experiment+links+students+Skype/3719354/story.html#ixzz13LLwtK4o
No comments:
Post a Comment