Technology Integration

Most teachers aren’t nearly as fortunate as I have been. They have a few laptops available, maybe one or two desktops in their classrooms. Not many have a mobile lab of 20-30 laptops with Internet access available to them…but they really should, you know.
What to do when there isn’t one to one? Two weeks ago, I stopped into the local market on my way to school and bought two large packages of M&M’s. I grabbed a few paper plates, and headed to the 4th grade classroom for a lesson. The teacher had no idea what I was going to do, and in fact had emailed me a web site to have them “look at,” but that was something she didn’t need me for really.
I separated the class into five groups, each of three or four students. Each group had a sorter, and there were one or three laptops per group. You can guess the rest.
The M&M’s were divided up roughly among the groups. Each sorter counted out the number and the colors. Each group created a spread sheet enumerating the colors and the amount for each, using a fill across and fill down formula to create the total for all.
They then experimented with graphs. We use Numbers, a part of iWork, Apple’s ‘answer’ to Excel, and did some neat things with pie charts, pulling the segments apart, copying and pasting into Keynote and Pages for practice.
At the end of the class, I summarized the exercise by adding the group totals together into one spreadsheet. We drew some conclusions.
The purpose of the lesson was have experience with the software, understand some terms such as mode, mean, median and range which they had been working on the week before, and just to interact with the technology as a different way of learning.
The kids did great…..didn’t lose a single piece of chocolate! (who would want to pop one of those into the mouth after having been handled by so many folks?) And I think we got the idea of how to make a spreadsheet, too.