The Importance Of National Educational Technology Standards

From an early age, students have the opportunity and the need to be taught many technology skills. When looking at the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) there are skills that all students need to know, no matter their age. Not only that, but English language arts standards for first grade state that students should “with guidance and support from adults [students will] use a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing” according to the Nevada Academic Content Standards (NVACS). To go along with the NVACS, the NETS standards chosen to go along with the activity these first graders completed are NETS for students are standard one (creativity and innovation) and standard two (communication and collaboration). The activity …show more content…
The students that participated in the activity were six and seven year old first graders in a typical classroom setting. Before the activity, teacher demonstrated basic computer skills on the projector. Teacher demonstrated how to find Google Chrome on the desktop computer and told students that they needed to click on it two times quickly to open it up. The next thing the teacher discussed was to click at the top where they saw words to type in “storybird.com.” Originally, the mini-lesson took place inside the classroom before students went to the computer lab which ended up being an issue, but the students ended up receiving a second lesson in the computer lab that was very explicit on how to log on to the computer and what to click on and the teacher kept the web address projected on the screen for students to see exactly what they need to type in. The activity required students to go onto a computer, open up a web browser, and type in “storybird.com.” Students had the opportunity to go on Storybird to find a picture that they wanted to use, using the search tools on the website, and use that picture to write a story. They were given the option to write a chapter book, picture book, or poem, but they were limited to picture book for now, otherwise they could only use one picture. They were responsible for creating the cover for their story, as well as adding pages and …show more content…
I introduced it too late last year to really have any effect on my students, but this year I explicitly taught Storybird. Overall, I feel this lesson had great value to the students and they learned a lot, even just from the lessons about how to log onto the computer and how to get to a website. Again, the students should have received a more explicit lesson right before they were able to get on the computer, modeled on a computer just like theirs. I feel they should have a more explicit lesson on how to use the keyboard and how to get to websites, but that is probably the next computer lesson that will be taught. I feel this was a great lesson for students to begin using their creativity on the web, giving them access to a new resource they can now use and practice their typing and writing