My placement this semester was (before schools were shut down due to the Coronavirus) at Beachwood High School. I was working with the ninth and eleventh graders in their English classes. The freshmen at BHS are required to take an introductory survey course, while the juniors take American literature.
Even though technology is widely and readily available at BHS. The students have an amazing library available to them. All of the students are given Chromebooks to use for their four years of high school. Each classroom has overhead projections to digitally project images from a book, a handout, or the computer onto the screen for the students to see.
The students also have online assignments for English class. The school uses Google classroom to turn in assignments and receive announcements from their teachers. This is similar to how we use Canvas at John Carroll.
Additionally, I noticed–while I was still observing in person at the school–that the students are eager to use technology for most of the school day. When I used to observe, I was at the school all day as part of my pre-student teaching hours. In study hall, it is common for students to be working independently on Chromebooks. When I asked students what they were doing, they mostly replied that they were completing work for a class later in the day; some students used their laptops to study for tests by using websites such as “quizzlet”.
If the students were not working on academics with their Chromebooks, they were quick to pull out their smartphone devices.
So many interactions occur between students in this fifty minute block. Quickly students begin to use snap chat by taking nonchalant photos of themselves regardless of how they look. They know that the photo is automatically deleted; part of the “game” of snap chat is to see how un-photogenic people look anyway. Students will ask, “did you ‘like’ my post?” referring to their Instagram uploads or Tweets.
The most common social media breakthrough I have observed is TikTok.
Constantly, students would ask me if they were allowed to make a TikTok video after they finished their work. Sometimes, the whole class would coordinate a TikTok video together. About fifteen students would cram together inside the frame, dancing to a seven second long song clip.
Even though some of the dance moves in TikTok might be deemed “inappropriate”–to which my coordinating teacher and I would not allow students to post obscene content on school property–the TikTok dances involved a sense of coordination, teamwork, and camaraderie among the students. In a strange way, I was glad to see them working together to create this content.
Clearly, the students are spending much of their time on various social media platforms.
Luckily, the students are also using technology for academic purposes as well.
When the students in the English class were starting new novels a few weeks ago, one of the first questions that the students from both grade levels asked was, “is there an audiobook version?”
None of the students are visually or cognitively impaired to the extent that they cannot read words. The students enjoyed the audiobook as a supplement to the novel itself.
When I questioned the students on why they insisted on having an audiobook, they said that it helped them with pronunciations of words. This audiobook was especially useful when the juniors read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The book is so heavy with Southern dialect that it can be very difficult to understand what the characters are saying for someone who is unfamiliar with African American dialect from the reconstruction period.
Even though technology is available and clearly being used at BHS, my cooperating teacher tries to limit the amount of technology she uses in her classroom. She is not old in age, however she is skeptical of technology. In her previous experiences, she told me, “the PowerPoint never works when your Principal comes in to observe or you lose all your files you saved and now you don’t have any materials to present to the class.”
Because of this, my teacher tries to be as old-school as possible. She does use Google Classroom and other forms of technology. But there are other methods she would prefer to use with old fashioned pen and paper.
All of the students take quizzes and tests on paper. They do not submit Google forms instead of paper exit slips. The students must place their phones in a box for in-class essays or evaluations. The juniors recently did an alternative evaluation for their knowledge and understanding of Huck Finn. This was a creative interpretation of a specific scene from the novel in a hand-drawn comic strip or graphic novel. The students were not allowed to incorporate anything digitally for that particular assignment.
There are assignments that do require the use of a computer: such as an out-of-class essay. However, most assignments involve books, paper, and their brains.
I know that this contrasts sharply with the information that we discuss and learn and read about in this course. It is strange to me that in this digital age, this teacher is so strongly fighting this uphill battle of technology in the classroom. There are certainly places were I could see the use of technology seamlessly integrated. For example, the teacher could use PowerPoint or Google Slides instead of rewriting information on the white board for every class. Additionally, this information would not be lost every day when she erases the white board. However, I do sympathize with her skepticism of technology. It is unfortunate when all of your digital work gets erased or when something malfunctions when you need it (such as when you are being observed by your Principal!)
I miss my students and I hope they are doing well with this transition to online learning. Now my cooperating teacher is forced to use much more technology in her digital classroom. I think the students are relying heavily on Google classroom rather than digital lectures in a Zoom format.
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