My classes are a long long way from normalisation. I wondered why.
A classmate said this:
"I think it partially comes down to the fact that you haven't used them in class yet. Like everything new (which phones, Office and the like were at one point for all of us in our daily lives), it takes a bit of discomfort and fiddling around with it for a while to become comfortable enough to use it consistently, without too much concious thought--normalised."
I was thinking about this over the weekend, and it got under my skin a little bit. I thought "Yeah...he's right.... not normalised because I just don't use it enough". I see a lot of roadblocks, and so I don't bother to try to get around them. So I decided that I need to do something about that. I need to get my students into the lab. And often. And we need to start somewhere... and deal with the bumps as they come.
So, for this morning's reading class, I prepared 2 lessons: one version was a standard, pen and paper, communicative, top-down reading lesson. The second took the text and the communicative scanning -for-details activities into the lab. I wasn't sure if I would be able to book the lab, so I wanted a backup plan ready to go!
I was in luck! The lab was open for exactly one hour at the beginning of my lesson, which meant that I had to rearrange bits of my lesson plan so that we could be there in the allotted time slot. Some normally 'first' things got shifted to 'last'. OK. No problem. One roadblock down!
Next, my students need demonstrated instructions, but I cannot do that inside the lab, since there is no central teacher's computer, no projector, and red walls which are not exactly projector-friendly. I spent the first 30 minutes of class in the usual pre-reading preparation activities...activating background schemata, examining titles and pictures, making predictions, etc., and then I gave them a demonstration of how to get to the website (we were examining the "Canada Food Guide", published by the government of Canada, and available freely online). I also gave them a little card with the directions clearly printed out, so they could take it with them. Second roadblock down!
The activity was a simple skimming and scanning activity which I won't describe here, but it went fairly smoothly. Students were interested in the topic, and took some time to read other sections of interest. They worked in pairs and it took about 20 minutes (until the lab closed). We then went back to the classroom to continue the lesson and share results.
The worst part of the whole thing was that most of the students (7/10) did not know how to get into the computers. Almost none of them knew their user ID's and passwords. It took about 10 minutes to get everyone signed in. The start-up time delayed us quite a bit. What that tells me is that NONE of the students have tried to use the lab since their first day of class, 5 weeks ago. They haven't even tried to get in to check email, and clearly, none of their other teachers have taken them to use the lab. I made it clear that they will need to learn their ID's, because we will be going in quite often. Third roadblock...coming down!
It is my intention to try to get students into the lab at least for a few minutes every day. It may not be possible, as the signout sheet is already quite full until the end of the month. But I really believe it is necessary to try for even a few minutes a day! Normalisation...integration surely must start this way: one step at a time. " A little bit of discomfort and fiddling around" may be necessary, but slowly, it becomes a natural occurence, hardly worthy of note. That is my hope.
Thanks, Tyson, for the inspiration!
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