Classroom Observation

The computer lab in East Elementary School is a small room that includes two types of computers. Eight machines of Apple IIGS which are very old and used only for teaching word processing and seven new have Windows 95, two of them only connected to the Internet.

 

There were ten students in the lab graded from 4 to 6 and they worked in different tasks. Some of them use their computers to play games, others constructed their home pages and very few who searched the Internet. Students' interaction with each other and the desire to discover and experience new information in the computer were interesting remarks in that hour session. The two students who search the internet engaged in evaluative dialog about some "cool" sites they had visited. Matthew who claimed that he had more than 20 home pages worked with Corel WordPerfect and searched for the tool that would change his home page's background. After while he successfully changed the color of the background. He used to seek help from adult, but in that time he did it by himself

 

Mr. Carroll - the teacher- was a helpful and supportive during that open session. Students were free and eager to ask questions about ambiguous aspects of their works on computers. He indicated that computing activities in the lab included typing, word processing and searching the internet. Also, he pointed out that advanced students might have a classes in JAVA. It seems that Mr. Carroll is IBM fan and he had his reasons for that.