Technology, Children, and the Power of the Heart

Technology, Children, and the Power of the Heart

By: Cindy Bravaco

September 18, 2003

The primary focus of this article is to teach or give educators a better understanding of how children grasp new technology. The article stated that many teachers are stuck in the transmission or "lecture/demonstration" type of teaching. It seems that lecturing is best used in transferring simple knowledge but ineffective for more complex learning.

The article described two different events. These two events differed in that one event gave the power of technology to the child and the other kept the power with the instructor.

Journal Writing Event

This demonstration was done in several first grade classrooms. They established a student mentoring process by electing several students in class as the Journal Experts. The showed these students how to keep a journal of their class events and how to make entries into this journal. The journal simply contained the day's date and two or three sentences of the day's events. These experts then helped the other students with their entries and this seemed to spark the fire for most children. The felt the power of being able to "do it" as mentioned in the article. There was one student that they mentioned that they clearly saw signs of a withdrawn child so they assigned this child to be one of the class experts and this child showed quick signs that he was bright and capable and was very excited about have the power of the computer processor. This child quickly changed his attitude.

Digitizing Pictures

This event was used in a second grade classroom. A few students were named the experts once again and were taught how to use a camera. They were taught the basic picture taking skills needed to take a photo and then they were taught to transfer it to the computer. Teaching the transfer skills would be more difficult, however it seemed to work because of the child's desire to learn and know how it worked. These "experts" were then to demonstrate and teach the other students how this worked. This experiment did prove that the child's desire to have control of such thing as a camera and the desire to know can take them

...