The past Friday, I went to Greene County Middle school with Z and S. The teacher was doing a wireless grant in her classroom, and she hoped we went there to observe her and give and some suggestion.
We went to two classes. The first one was 4th grade, the seconde one was 6th grade. I was more interested in the seconde one, because that was a special education class, which means some of kids in that class were with some kind of disabilities, either mentally or physically.
Both class sizes were smaller than those in China. I remember when I was in middle schoo, I had 45 classmates. And the alignments of the classroom were different. There were sinks at the back of the classroom and two cabinets. One lecture station and one teacher desk with a computer on it. Each student was using a Gateway laptop. Z explained when we were on the way to the school: this school is poor and many students can’t afford a laptop. So the grant is to assure each kid have access to the computer and internet.
The teacher applied a lot of activities in the class.
In the first class, she asked students to look some web resources first, then look at a slide on the wall. Then she asked students find out some features between the earth and the Mars which is like or unlike. Then she review the previous class content. The last part was a quick quiz.
For the second class, the special education one, she adpoted different activities. Kids were asked to read the internet resources first. During that time, another male teacher came in and sit down beside kids to help them review the resouces. Then they were given a quiz and they were asked to finish the quiz with the book and the internet. The teacher walked around in the classroom to help kids.
Those kids did look a littel bit different. One little boy was kind of like irretated and anoying. He was lying on the desk and not willing to finish the test. Several other kids also shew different kinds of unstable. But, anyway, I like them a lot, and I think they are so cute, even each of them looked so serious.
Tag: k-12
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First experience of American K-12 classroom
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Technology Competitive Grant Application
I am helping with evaluating these applications from k-12 schools of GA. This process teaches me a lot. I know what this type of application should look like now. I know how different those application proposals could be when they are written by different teams of different school, even they are writing under exactly the same proposal writing rubric…
Some proposals are really good, but these proposals are usually from schools with a well-trained team, and they usually are wealthy, which means, they might not need this grant , or they might need it, but not as much as those poorer schools.
On the contrary, there was a poor-written article. It was short, unlogical, not having enough evidence, not persuading… But there was one thing which made me want to recommend them: their data indicating they are really not a rich school and with outdated computers and software. I wished to recommend this school, but my mentor colleague, J, thought they should not be recommended, because they don’t have a good plan of how to use the grant, how to evaluate the implementing results and how to disseminate. These, are really important things to decide if they should get the grant, she said. I had to agree with her, because she was professional at this point. But I still feel… maybe those schools really in need won’t get grants because they don’t have a good writing team…