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I've become one of those teachers who drools over incorporating technology into my lessons. But I wasn't always that way. Six and a half years ago, I felt overwhelmed. The idea of trying to blend digital pictures, slide shows, interactive telecommunications, and the Internet into my teaching was somewhere between unheard of and downright terrifying. Back then, all I wanted was to type tests on our library's Commodore 64 -without having it go haywire before I saved. Since it took 15 minutes to save one document, it was a race against the clock. A district policy (a very smart policy!) allowing teachers to take a computer home over the summer turned my attitude around. That summer, I signed up for several Macintosh classes through the Math Learning Center at Portland State University. And I played. I made greeting cards with graphics. I created a database for addresses and birthdays. I wrote letters, drew pictures, and even made spreadsheets for keeping track of grades and attendance. This playtime often stretched into the wee hours of the morning. As I explored and experimented on my Macintosh, I relived the joy of discovery every day. And I formed an opinion: Kids learn computers fastest because they play. Likewise, we teachers need time to play and become comfortable-even excited-about our computers in order to extend their usefulness in classroom instruction. Over the next few years, my classroom computer use evolved exponentially. At first, the best I could do was to calculate grades, keep attendance, and create handouts and tests with graphics. During that time I learned an impor tant lesson: This contraption was not a mysterious beast that would suddenly self-destruct. What a relief! I just needed time to become secure. Once I developed some confidence, if only a teensy bit at first, I found that even one computer in a classroom added to my ability to differentiate curriculum, thus challenging my gifted students and assisting my struggling students. I found that a single computer could both enrich instruction and level the playing field, benefitting all my students. A student whose vocabulary was far above the rest of the class, for instance, could use the SAT prep program to stretch herself. A student whose motor coordination made it nearly impossible to write an essay was no longer inhibited by a physical handicap. Through membership in the Portland Macintosh Users Group, I discovered countless programs-many of them public-domain (free) or shareware (inexpensive try-before-you-buy)-that can be used for individualized student instruction. Today, many people discover these resources by surfing the Internet. Often the classroom computer serves as a tool added to my arsenal of books and other materials. When writing an essay centered around a quotation, for instance, my sophomore language arts students use both Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (the book) and Quotable Quotes (the Macintosh program). When doing consumer research on a prospective purchase (anything from a pager to a car to a bread machine for Mom or Dad), my junior English students might access Consumer Reports magazine online (http://www.consumerreports.org) to find a key issue missing from our collection. Other times a CD-ROM may provide an additional resource. The Time Almanac, for example, includes original articles dating back to the early 1900s. A U.S. atlas and a world atlas are also available on CD. The World Wide Web, too, may excite students with the latest discoveries in space or in a university across the world. Sites rich in information useful to students include NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov), the MayaQuest visit to Mayan ruins (http://africaquest.classroom.com/maya2001/) and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/). Early on, I discovered that my Macintosh could use a large-screen TV if I connected a $300 presentation device (Presenter Plus Mac/PC Multi-Frequency) between the computer and the television. Initially, this became a way to present textual information-such as vocabulary due dates or lists of ideas generated during a class brainstorming session-in a visual form. The next day, the material could be printed out for absentees, who could retrieve it from the daily absence folders. The computer/TV duo became a great way to assist visual learners. Whether I presented a chart for organizing data or a brief slide show previewing a lesson, visual students could see where we were going and better fit the ideas into a mental framework. On occasion I even created a literature review game with student-generated questions about stories and literary techniques. (You can view my Sophomore Review Game on the World Wide Web at http://www.ttsd.k12.or.us/schools/ths/jdubois/ short_story_review.html). If you are blessed with having a multimedia-capable computer, the range of possibilities is endless. I have used movies such as The Black Stallion and The Natural to teach visual literacy. Students write about and discuss examples of visual literacy observed in the film: zooming for emphasis, juxtaposing scenes to show relationships, foreshadowing to create suspense, lighting to set a mood, camera angle to create an illusion, and so on. When we finish, I give them a visual-literacy test, one in which I have embedded stills from the movie into a ClarisWorks slide show along with enlarged text questions. This extends their understanding, challenges their thinking, and reinforces their awareness of an entirely new way of seeing. An equally exciting multimedia adventure is making tutorials for prominent characters in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. These instructional slide shows acquaint readers with the characters by presenting information, character motivation, and brief film clips, which students watch before acting out the characters in their reading groups. Eventually, I became confident enough to require students to include in their term project some aspect of technology—a digital image, a graph, a Web page-that was entirely new to them. Once a week they had class time to work on the project—and yes, we did have access to a computer lab. But we could have scheduled the work throughout the week, giving several students a chance to use the classroom computer each day. Some projects, such as a vocabulary slide show and quiz, became a study resource for other students. My experiences have taught me that the one-computer classroom truly has the potential to be dynamic, with new possibilities unfolding as time, creativity, and comfort allow. Perhaps most exciting of all is how the computer opens the door to new roles and relationships: student-as-instructor and teacher-as-facilitator. Jeanine DuBois teaches language arts at Tigard High School, where she avidly promotes technology as an educational tool. In addition to 19 years of teaching English, DuBois has several years' experience teaching workshops for educators through the Northwest Regional Education Service District, Tigard-Tualatin School District, Portland Macintosh Users Group, National High School Association, and NCCE.
To visit her educational Web site, point your browser to http://www.ttsd.k12.or.us/schools/ths/jdubois/JD.html.
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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