Teaching Outside the Box: Minooka Elementary Teacher Uses Technology to Enhance her Teaching

Kathleen Byrd’s students learned how to make a chart by using a computer. In the end, the students learned a new skill, and talked about how they could use a chart in other applications, as well.

Before Byrd was a second grade teacher at , she was a technology instructor, so she is using those skills to enhance her teaching.

Her recent efforts to teach her second grader students a mathematics concept was made more fun when each pair of students was able to sit in the computer lab, format their own chart and print it.

“It’s going to take a lot of listening and watching,” Byrd explained as she started the directions.

Even without the suggestion, all eighteen students seemed to have their attention on the topic, as they adroitly managed their keyboards and followed the directions.

The idea of the lesson was to see what color jelly bean was the favorite among the students.

In a show of hands, the class determined that red and pink beans were favored, with some of the other colors coming in less so.

Giving the group step-by-step directions, Byrd was able to direct each pair to correctly put information in the chart that they created. The second graders then selected a format to display their information in a visual graph. Finally, the students chose the appropriate color for each of the bars in the graph to represent different colors of jelly beans. Students helped each other, and took turns keyboarding.

After the charts were printed, students talked about and showed the charts to each other.

At the end, Byrd asked the group how else they could use a chart. One student said she could show the number of family members. Another said the information could be used to show numbers of boys compared to numbers of girls. Another girl said she thought her mom and dad could use a chart for their work.

Byrd suggested that the students might take it a step further and show their parents how to make a chart on the computer.