My week was busy even by my standards… In my Social Science classes students were creating Photo Story projects for Ancient Greece. They were tasked with creating a story of the role culture played in Greek life. We used creative commons sites to gather pictures and a graphic organizer to get out facts together from our text. Today we got all our pictures in order and will narrate and finalize the movies on Monday.
In my Language Arts classes I told the students they had five days to create a product to show their understanding of sensory imagery in a piece of literature. I wrote about this project in my Cure for the Book Report post earlier in the week.
With both of these projects, a very valuable lesson was reinforced with me: Don’t Touch the Mouse. What I mean by this is that as a teacher it is very tempting to help a student by doing something for them. When you see them struggling to right mouse click and save an image, you want to grab the mouse and do it for them. It would be easier for me to just crop Johny’s pictures for him and align them on his timeline, but then he never learns how to do it. I am thinking of some fishing quote right now and feeding men… Anyways, whatever you do, don’t touch the mouse. Teach through your words and modelling and let students perform the tasks on their own. By not touching the mouse you empower students rather than enabling them.
Thanks Josh,
It's always good to get a reminder around these important lessons. I still always start to grab the mouse and have to step back and declare, "I want the student to do it and I'll give direction."