I watched the video, “Using technology to support research groups in the early childhood classroom”. The purpose of this video is to show how using technology with learning at such a young age is beneficial. The video explores a preschool classroom using technology as research for topics they are learning. The teacher in the video explains how there are a lot of topics outside of their curriculum that they wish to explore, so she has set time aside for them to do so — their choice, doing their own research, navigating with technology (iPads, laptops, video recordings, taking pictures, googling, etc.).
The class does a research assignment each week. In the morning at the start of the week, the teacher will split students into three groups. Each group is assigned a topic to research on. In the video, the three topics were cats, dogs, and alligators. Throughout the week, they work on researching information on the topic. At the end of the week, each group will share out to the class what they learned. The teacher, Yeliz Zurawic, emphasizes that it is her goal to for students to relate what they are learning in the classroom to the outside world/their own experiences. The video showed one student in the ‘cat’ group discussing how her cat moves her tail just like it does in the research she found about cats tails.
Zurawic states in the video that research should not be limited just through books or just through technology. There is a good mix of using both resources — some information may only be found in certain books while some information can only be found online. It is important to remember to not limit oneself when researching, that there are various resources and tools all around. This can relate to the actual concept of distributed cognition that proposes cognition and knowledge are not confined to an individual, but distributed across objects, individuals, objects, artifacts, and tools in the environment.
It was interesting to see kids at the preschool level working with technology and researching information. I think this type of learning really benefits them because they will take these skills and apply/use it for years to come. To answer the question of, “Will this lesson and how technology is integrated make the students smarter? If so why? If not, why not?”, I believe this lesson will make the students smarter. As teachers, we need to recognize that times are changing and technology use will be implemented in all classrooms/grade levels. I think that this way of integrating technology is beneficial to them because they are learning and becoming familiar with online research. They will see technology not just as for playing games or watching TV, but for educational purposes as well.
Educational Technology -- Mlyssa 