Larry Restuccia and Cyndi Hurlbut are fourth grade teachers at Center Woods Elementary School in Weare, New Hampshire. Weare is a rural town with a population of about 6000. The elementary school is a pre-K to fourth grade, with a student population of 750. Each grade level has six classrooms of 22-26 students per classroom.

This project was designed to teach educators various media applications students can use to populate their Personal Learning Portfolios (PLPs), once the portfolios have been created. In order to provide a wide range of applications, we focused our presentation around an integrated ocean unit. We included Word documents, an Excel bar chart, a Kid Pix drawing, scanned photographs of three dimensional projects, and i-movies. Students created various artifacts in the different medias and uploaded the files to their PLPs. Other lessons included in this project were: What is a PLP? How to use digital equipment, How to scan photographs, How to create I-movies, How to interpret data and produce a visual chart comparing information, and finally a reflection paper on group team work. We have included these various software applications to show educators that virtually any type of artifact can be used by students to showcase their favorite pieces of work.

Thoughts from a pre-service teacher

Meaghan Dube is a pre-service teacher at New England College. Here's her introduction and thoughts about this project:

My name is Meaghan Dube. I am a second year Elementary Education major specializing in Social Studies at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. The school is located in south-central New Hampshire, about twenty minutes outside of the state capital, Concord. I received my high school diploma from Saint Thomas Aquinas in Dover, New Hampshire in June 2001. When not at school, I reside in Newmarket, New Hampshire, a small town in the southeastern corner of the state.

I would like to teach fourth grade once I have my Bachelor’s Degree. Ideally, I will teach in Newmarket, with some of the same teachers I had years ago. I have pictured myself as a teacher for many years. I have been inspired by several wonderful teachers from my past, reaching back to first grade. I like the challenges in teaching. I look forward to meeting the needs of the various students that I will have in my classroom. If I can inspire only one of them the way I have been inspired so many times, I will feel that all of the difficulties facing teachers right now will be worthwhile. I want to make a difference in a child’s life. I feel that teaching is one of the most important jobs in the world. Teachers prepare future generations for the challenges they will face in the world around them. This teaching cannot always come from a book, map, blackboard, or even technology. It comes from life experience, and the heart.

While I have been at New England College, I have been fortunate enough to spend time in the Weare School District through New England College’s partnership with SAU 24. At the Weare Middle School, I spent time with a very energetic class of sixth graders being taught by a New England College graduate, Jessica MacAllen. Through this semester long experience, I came to the realization of how “on my toe”’ it is necessary to be at all times. The students are wonderful, but at the average age of twelve, it is obvious to see how all of their energy can lead them to make unwise decisions.

My second experience has been at Center Woods Elementary School, where I have worked with another pre-service teacher from New England College, Lindsey Inman, and fourth grade teachers Cindy Hurlbut and Larry Restuccia. Our project has been designing a PLP. Throughout the semester, we have taught the class ways to implement the use of technology in the classroom. For example, students learned how to use a Word Document, and then they were taught how to upload it to their Personal Portfolio. These portfolios are great because they allow students to save work that they are particularly proud of without the paper clutter. Through the experience they are having with these portfolios now they will reap the benefits in the future when they are showing pieces of work in the future. While it is not the point focused on in fourth grade, they will be able to use electronic portfolios such as these for the rest of their lives. The work the students did using technology did not end with word processing. The students, along with their regular classroom teachers and their pre-service teachers learned the fun art of making an i-movie, and using technology to collect and sort data, such as that collected during a taste test of food from the sea. We also had fun with the computer-drawing program ‘Kid Pix.’

Implementing technology in the classroom is not always easy. It is difficult to plan for glitches in the system, such as a computer just not wanting to work. It is frustrating when work was accidentally not saved, or saved work suddenly disappears. However, as teachers become more comfortable with technology and come up to speed with the knowledge that their students already seem to have in some cases, things are sure to go more smoothly. It is very important to use technology in the classroom. It is vital to instill safety in the minds of one’s students, especially when using the Internet. Technology is certainly not going to go away, nor should it. It must be embraced and learned how to be used effectively. There is a careful balance that must be created between new and old school teaching methods. The lessons still must be taught, but the method for teaching them sometimes must be changed. There are of course those lessons that cannot be changed and will still need to be taught from the heart.