Access for Younger Children

One of the things that continually challenges me as a teacher of younger children, is the barriers to technology that they face.  This notion made me pause to reflect on my responsibility as a future administrator.

Barriers:

The main trouble that we face as teachers is access.  First, there are identifications and passwords.  Frequently, these are randomly assigned to the children as I sign them up for a website. For example, one identification for a child was Id:  “bonus96a” and the child’s password were akin to “squire15.”  These were really difficult for many of the children to remember.  Now, I have learned my lesson and have used both index cards with identifications and passwords printed upon them as well as large Popsicle sticks with this information written on them as well.  (My one friend lost her stick so many times that I made six additional sticks knowing that this would occur.) However, this takes a lot of time to time to provide this information to the children while several  children are needing help with merely logging onto the computer itself.  Typically I use about 5 main websites on which the children can learn at their own pace. This is can be very confusing for the children themselves let alone the teacher juggling their 25 student accounts and passwords.

The second major difficulty that teachers face is that younger children have little exposure to keyboarding.  I find that I am encouraging parents to work on this with their children at home as well. The more that they are exposed to this they will be able to find the letters that they are looking for.  I use Alpha Smarts in the classroom mainly to expose the children to finding the letters on the keyboard,  rather than it purpose of allowing children to type assignments.

On another note, the children are not as exposed to proper computer keyboards.  They are more exposed to virtual keyboards on tablet computers.  This provides only a minimal challenge for the children because they are able to adapt to the change, but it is a challenge nonetheless.

Applications as administrators:

These issues provide learning opportunities for administrators.  It is that we must provide both time and opportunity for teachers to expose our children to basic technology before the children are actually able to access the technology.  Typically in my building, we attend the computer lab once every week.  This is not usually enough exposure for the children to remember their identifications and passwords. So administrators must be aware that this takes time and may offer additional resources to their K-1 teachers in terms of frequency of access. 

In addition, administrators need to be aware that the future is access to password based technology and should  perhaps offer a technology access package when a child especially a Kindergarten student registers so that parents can take a proactive approach to their child's technological education and share this information with the prospective student.