Computer Lab

My students go to computer lab every Monday for about 50 minutes. They are super excited, even from the beginning of the day, “Are we going to the computer lab today?!” “What are we doing today?” “Can we play games?!” My response, “Yes, work, next week.” Does this dampen them? No, they are relentless with glee until they arrive.

They walk in, turn on the computer, quickly place the headphones on and wait for the blue screen so they can log on. Over the weeks they have become pros – doing all of it as it they had done it all of their lives; and some of them have. They navigate to our class homepage to scroll through the websites we have collected over all of our units through the year. They see a post for next unit and nearly fall off of their chair to ask if they can click on those sites. “Not yet, those are for next week.” Resigned to visiting a site they know well, off they go to explore the world wide web.

Some days we design scrapbook pages to document what we have done in class over the last month. They know how to insert pictures, change the color/contrast/brightness, insert wordart: change font and color, make funny shapes over their friends’ heads and save it to it’s appropriate location. They are eager to try out what they have learned that day during our mini lesson. Sometimes it’s inserting something new and finding the location, other times it is changing what they already have. It never takes them long to take it into their own personal creativity territory; far beyond my expectations of their abilities. They surprise me each time.