Maybe not a failure afterall!

I should have posted this back in June but I was a wee bit "busy" dealing with end of year things around school. So here is the background: I had a student who took a family holiday for close to 3 months and then reappeared in my class around March. She had missed so much but thanks to technology I was able to provide her with resources on my sharepoint which is full of links and JINGs, and a list of unit tests she needed to write by June. I did agreed that she would not be expected to do every assignment completely, but enough to master the skill so that she could write the unit test ... and I was available for extra help.

Flash forward to June: this young lady arrived in my classroom the day before the final exam to ask me some final last questions. She had managed to catch up and write all tests by this point. I commended her on her dedication and hard work (she had pulled her mark up from 23% to 70% pretty much on her own as I rarely saw her for extra help). Did she get a tutor to help her out? Nope, she said that the 3 days in the computer lab, which she had detested at the time, had been the difference. As she was working through the units and needing some extra help, she remembered the list of websites I had provided for the Measurement computer unit. So she thought she would see if she could find any sites to help her now. Her words .."there are tonnes of good math websites out there!" ... as if she was surprised. Everything she wanted to learn about was there for her and she was quickly converted once she realized this. She didn't need to come see me for help because she figured things out for herself with a little help from google! She went on to explain that she took it a step further and started making use of the internet for her other courses. Even funnier was when she described helping friends with their work and she asked if they had bothered to do any investigating on their own using the internet and that its the teacher's job to teach but it is up to the student to make sense of the information. Wow ..... this completely took my computer webquest experience from a definite failure to a success. I had one student who because of what I attempted to do with technology in the class, walk away as a more competetant learner ready to take on the responsibility for her own learning. As I told her, her sharing this experience with me was a highlight for day and maybe my entire year ... and I meant it.

Now to figure out how to reach more than one student a year! :)