Respect

I had a moment today with my students that I have to share. My first class of the day was 4th grade. They were scheduled to come to me half an hour early because we were supposed to finally launch our bottle rockets...the weather did not cooperate. So instead we met at our usual time in my classroom. They were already seated in the classroom when I arrived and were talking. I thanked their teacher for waiting with them and as I walked into the room my students stopped talking and began counting down 3, 2, 1 and then dead silence. I was amazed and shocked...170 days of school and this is the first class to take my classroom signal and do it themselves. If the class is getting too loud or I need their attention I will say,"Give me three" and then we count down together. I will be very sad to see them move to the middle school next year. It was an awesome moment for me, I know it doesn't seem like much, but to have them get themselves together without a single prompt from me was great. Better yet, as I started our lesson a student started to talk and his neighbors promptly told him, "Yo get quiet, my teacher is trying to talk."

I decided to reward them by trying an unofficial lesson that I have been pondering for some time now. We had our first group chat session using the instant message extension of NetSupport School. We went over some ground rules and away we went. It was great, it was a casual experience of multitasking which is something I usual try to avoid because it tends to confuse my students to the point of frustration. However, they handled it really well. I enjoy having a secure chat environment that allows me to go over safety tips and monitor everything that is being typed whether the student sends the message or not. I set up a text filter that scans what the students are typing and identifies "innaprporiate words" Basically it is a cuss list that notifies me when a student types something they shouldn't. Lucky for me none of my students said anything inappropriate. In fact they were using it to send links to the activities they were doing without talking. I showed them how to copy and paste a link in the chat window so they could share the "cool" activities with their friends. Some of my students already knew how to do this but the more I work with each class the more I realize how wide the gaps are in ability between each student when it comes to using a computer.