The course that I have designed will include an emphasis on students learning to keyboard. They will spend the first few minutes of every class period working on their typing skills. The other skills identified will be broken up into units. The students will spend a few weeks on each unit. During this time, they will learn how to use different tools and features. Each unit will end with a unit project that ties what they are learning with technology into their different academic classes. I see the students using Word or Google Docs to create a newsletter related to a Social Studies lesson. I also see them using PowerPoint to create a presentation on a Science topic and any number of tools to write, revise and publish a piece of writing for an English class. My excitement for the possibilities continues to grow, because there are so many ways to incorporate technology skills into academic and art classes. I feel that this class can be unique each time it is taught because of the content being taught in other classes. We are at an advantage because the students who will take this course are all in the same academic and art classes.
In the end, it is my hope that the students will leave the technology course having a better understanding of numerous different programs and tools available to them.
The teachers and parents both felt that teaching the students how to research effectively was very important. Many parents also wrote in that teaching students how to be safe online was an important topic to teach. Teachers felt that keyboarding should be included in the class and many parents agreed. Parents also cited that many workplaces require employees to have a basic understanding of many Office products, so parents felt that the students should at least be taught how to do the basics with Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
The results were fairly predictable. The students said they could not type without looking at the keyboard and can not type with their fingers on home row. They also were missing skills related to troubleshooting, specifically how to force quit a program that wasn’t responding. The students also indicated that they did not know how to work with columns and tables in Word and while they could create a presentation in PowerPoint, they were not as sure about adding videos and hyperlinks. Only about half of the students said they had used Google Docs and/or Prezi before.