Integrating Computers in my Everyday Lessons

Through doing research on handouts in the Teachers Network website, I found many articles on how to integrate technology in the classroom. However, the one that caught my attention the most was one called "Differentiated Learning Using the Computers" by Ann Stephenson. Stephenson writes about many ways in which we can ask students to use the computer, to reinforce learned material, to expand their knowledge on computers and to make sure they are engaged in the lesson. Nevertheless, the strategies that pertain to my subject area are those of making a classroom newsletter every week, making databases on student information like emails and phone numbers, tracking attendance and making bar graphs of it. The above stated activities will not only serve them as practice for English, but will also serve them as practice in math and computers, while also providing the teacher with documents that could be hanged around the classroom and shown to parents in parent/teacher conferences. Because my second certification is in ESL, I also liked the idea of making pictographs in the computer and asking the students to write a word that explains what each picture stands for, like in the picture below.

 Activities like these, will allow the students to develop good and useful vocabulary that will eventually be used in other classes. These pictographs can be used in my classroom, not only to reinforce vocabulary for ELL, but also for monolingual kids who are learning specific vocabulary words, or are learning about a specific time period, author, or novel. I do not think that things like this can be done every day; however, through substituting it has been my experience, that it is very hard to engage kids when it is a Friday and they are thinking of things to do on the weekend. However, things like these can be great things to make the classroom environment less tense and to reward those students who are trying hard and completing the work, while also giving me time to talk to individual students about their performance during that week.