Field Experience Assignment

Mrs. Coulon’s third grade class is one of eight third grade classes at Hooksett Memorial School located in Hooksett, New Hampshire. Every Monday afternoon, after lunch, Mrs. Coulon brings her 23 third graders to one of the computer labs located in the school. In the computer lab, she uses a SMART board to model for her students the process of logging in to the computer, navigating the school wiki page, as well as logging in to the AR application. The school homepage wiki is a Glogster design, with bright colors and easy to find tabs. Students clicked on the AR button, which brought them to a website by Renaissance Reader, called a Renaissance Page. On this page was the AR application, short for Accelerated Reader. This is a program that offers short quizzes on books, adjusted to size by the reading level of the book, that the students can take at their own pace. Almost every book that the children could think of was located in this site, searchable by title, author or keyword. The students worked together to type in the name of the story that Mrs. Coulon had spent the last few weeks reading to them, Charlotte’s Web, and each student answered 10 questions based on reading comprehension. They also have the choice of testing their vocabulary or literacy comprehension. The majority of the class navigated this whole process with ease. They were able to find the homepage tab at the top of the web page and many students typed with one finger or two.

After the students had finished their quizzes, they headed back to their classrooms to work on practicing cursive handwriting, and some students took additional book quizzes, using the AR app, on the classroom IPads. There are 30 IPads available to the entire school, so there are 10 shared per grade. The students remembered their logins that they had just practiced in the lab, and continued to show how easily they can manipulate technology by navigating the same process with the quizzes quickly and efficiently.  For these third graders, it was the first time they had used an IPad in their school classroom, although you couldn’t tell that from the way they handled the devices.

In my opinion, the use of the AR application is a very smart tool for these children because it is something they have the skills to navigate at their age and they can use the application on many different computers and hand-held devices. The quizzes themselves allow for modifications for students who are advanced, a little behind, or have special needs. Since the only technology I saw present during the day was SMART boards, computer labs, and IPads, I asked the teacher if she had plans to integrate any other kinds of technology. She said she did not have any immediate plans, and did not feel that they would likely have access to more than the 10 IPads any time soon. I feel that the ways that she has incorporated technology so far are certainly more stimulating than the alternative (for example, taking paper quizzes), but I do wonder if there are more tools or applications that could be used in her curriculum to further learning. The most interesting part of the observation was when the teacher confessed to me that she was not trained on her SMART board when it was brought into the classroom, that the children were trained and that she had to follow along with them and then rely on them later to help her. This reminded me of the co-learning environment we talked about in our class. Apparently the students really like when they get to help out their teacher and be the ‘expert.’