Take Small Steps! Laurie Lanvermeier Clayton Middle School

MT: How did you get interested in teaching?

Laurie: I had the teaching fellows scholarship and I applied for that because I felt like I had never really had many really good teachers.  I had two that I really thought were special, and other than that I felt like there needed to be more.

Then I came to NC State and got a degree in Middle Years Language Arts and Social Studies ... and I taught two years before I started the Master’s program with a concentration in Reading.

MT: What are the types of things you have done in your past teaching experience with technology?

Laurie: We used Word Processing a lot in the computer lab as well as with the one computer in my room.  We were fortunate enough to have the LTV presenter, where you could see the computer screen on the TV, so all the children could see it at the same time.  And we used that two or three times a week with their daily oral language, grammar sentences. They could decide in their group which one they thought was most accurate, type it into the computer, and then as a class we could edit those until it was correct and everybody could copy down the correct thing.  That way they didn’t know whose paper was being typed on the computer, it was just somebody in that group.

We use the Internet a lot for research and I use the Internet a lot for lesson plans and ideas, background about characters and authors, things like that.  When we are doing novels, for example the Pig Man, we did a virtual fieldtrip to New York City so that they could have a better idea of where the characters where and what things were like there.  They visited the zoo, just like the zoo in the book.

MT: Can you tell me a little more about how you teach grammar mini-lessons using the computer?

Laurie: Usually it was several different things from the DOL books, where you can put a couple sentences everyday.  Sometimes I would pull sentences from there, sometimes I would make up sentences depending on what I had seen in their writing, and sometimes I would use sentences that I had actually gotten from their writing to put as their grammar lesson for the day.

That sounds like Atwell!

She’s my hero!

MT: So would you say that you are very influenced by Atwell?

Laurie: Very, very ... I do reading workshop once every week ... but I would like to when I start back (as a full-time teacher) if I am in a regular Language Arts classroom, to really do Reading/Writing workshop all five days.

MT: You had one computer in your classroom in your two years of teaching?

Laurie: Yes

MT: Was that a good thing?  Or did it create frustrations?

Laurie: It was a good ... we had Accelerated Reader, which the kids can use ... our school is  networked so they have an account on each computer in the school, whether it is in the computer lab or in any teacher’s classroom.  The school does incentives for accelerated reader and I did extra incentives for Accelerated Reader.

The negative is that they are always fighting over it, like “he used it last week and now it is my turn.”  We had to keep a sign-up sheet of who gets to use it next ... I think it was beneficial and a lot better than not having any, but it would be nice to have more.

So Accelerated Reader was used as a motivating factor and to keep track of their reading?

MT: Could you organize small groups to do Internet searching?

Laurie: My AG kids did an independent study on the famous person of their choice and they knew how to use the Internet and were set free.  But for my other classes I gave five sites they could go to and narrowed it down for them.  Because some of them are very comfortable with doing a search and some of them have no idea where to type in the key word.

MT: How do you provide instruction on how to do Internet research?

Laurie: With eighth graders, I have to give them a deadline for each section, like ‘by this day I need to know your topic, by this day you need to have some brainstorming/prewriting.’ Because a lot of them are very unorganized and will wait to the last moment to do the whole thing.  I want them actually go through the process of looking for it, synthesizing it, and eliminating what is not any good, and coming up with a good final product.  I have found that to do that you have to give them small steps and give them due dates for each section.

MT: Are there any specific topics you have researched on the Internet to create lesson plans for your classes?

Laurie: I use the Internet a lot.  My first year I was teaching The Diary of Anne Frank and the Social Studies teacher on my team did not want to teach it until the spring, when he got to it chronologically and I wanted to teach it in the fall, when we were going to the play, because that was when it was offered.  So I had to supplement some background on World War II and the Holocaust.  There is an excellent site that I used and got some poems written by survivors.

When I teach a novel for the first time I usually go and see what other people have said and their suggestions.  Sometimes you can find things that are already made up, but you have to be careful because sometimes they are not actually questions that come from the book.  You can’t just print off a quiz from the Internet ... just like they have to do, you have to do your side of the work. 

There really are some neat interactive grammar quizzes, where kids can click on the choices and get a ding if they got it right.  If they are having trouble with specific area you could call the parents at home and give them the site to work on at home or if they have extra time in class you could have them try it out there.  If it is on the computer they are much more likely to not mind doing it, whereas they would not like to do ‘8 through 15’ in the grammar book.

MT: Do you find a discrepancy between students’ knowledge in word processing?

Laurie: Some of them can type faster than anyone I have ever seen and some of them are still poking along and it takes them five days to get it done.  So that is when we use the computer in the classroom, to help students who are falling behind catch up without being penalized.

MT: Naturally, every student in your class will not have a computer at home ... is it hard to provide that equity?

Laurie: Yes, because some of them if they don’t have it at home, they aren’t real comfortable at school using it and they need you to sit right there and help them.  But, then again, you don’t want to help them all the time, because this is the information age and they will have to learn it some time.

MT: After being in graduate school for over a year, have you learned any new strategies involving technology that you are planning to use?

Laurie: I would like to find more time to incorporate technology. I have one computer in my classroom and eighty teachers signing up to use the computer lab.  To actually get a spot in the computer lab, you have to sign up six weeks in advance.

One thing I would like to try next year is a homework site that is a smaller link off the main site.  Each teacher can personalize it and they can update it daily or weekly the homework, upcoming dates, or letters to parents.  You can give the parents the address and they can use it at home and email the teachers back from the site. 

MT: What would you say is the biggest challenge to incorporating technology into the curriculum?

Laurie: The biggest challenge would be resources and scheduling of time.

MT: Do you have any advice for beginning teachers?

Laurie: Take small steps and you can’t do it all at one time.

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