Practicum Post #5

 Mid-Prairie is a one to one school, this means that all student are provided with a laptop. One thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of students that forget to charge their laptops. My cooperating teacher has the garage extension chords on the ceiling, so students can pull them down to charge their laptops. There is roughly one above each table. One thing I would want to remember is to provide extension chords that reach student's desks, so they can charge their laptop while they work.

Continuing on from that side rant, my team teacher has a virtual lab notebook for each of the students. It is a powerpoint slide like notebook that has all of the data tables and handouts from the FOSS kits, along with spaces to answer their "guiding" questions (the ones from FOSS). They use this notebook nearly every class period. It contains everything from experiments to vocabulary. The teacher uses the PowerPoints provided by the FOSS kits, even though they are long and not in the best order. She plans on going through them and editing them over the summer. Since the students have their laptops, she does not allow for phones to be out in her classroom and has taking them away from a student in the past, because it became a distraction to them and their peers. 

Our cooperating teacher seems to love to find new resources to use in the classroom, or at least ones that pertain to science. She would have projects in the past where students create their own web page and have it so they can share it with their parents. The only issue with this is that the school is constantly adjusting what is allowed on their network to block games, but this also blocks educational resources, such as google sites or youtube and makes it a big hassle. In addition to this, because of the heavy structure of the FOSS kits it doesn't allow for the experimentation that she wants and as a result does not allow for the space to incorporate in these technologies well. I get the vibe that she would want to do more with technology, but has her hands tied behind her back in her ability to use it to its fullest capabilities.