Computer Lab Classes
A big part of my job for several years was supporting littles with learning how to use computers. They would come to the computer lab once per six-day cycle until they got Chromebooks, after which I went to them. It was an ever-evolving process figuring out how to make what we were doing with the computers align with the teachers’ needs and keep things efficient.
Early on, we’d try to ask teachers what they wanted to work on and then we’d make or find something by class time that would fit. As we got busier, this became less sustainable and it became clear it didn’t work towards logically building and reinforcing computer skills over time.
Next, I tried building typing practice activities in Microsoft Word. This kind of worked - I had example text with empty boxes underneath so students could type what they saw and match it with the example, so they could visually see if they were getting it (theoretically.) However, because the teachers had to keep manually checking students one-by-one before they could go to the next activity, it wasn’t particularly efficient.
I then switched to Google Forms. This allowed me to embed video mini-lessons on typing skills in the form itself. This meant students could do the activity whenever they or their teachers wanted independently. I also used response validation, which for short or paragraph question types will check what the student typed and look for an exact match before they could continue.
I also started using Google Forms and Autocrat to do our writing projects. Rather than having students type in a template and struggle with boxes moving around, I had them use Forms instead. I could even have videos with read-aloud support embedded for each question and include word banks so students could do writing projects independently in one sitting without needing a rough draft first. Autocrat would then take their responses and turn them into the pretty final project Google Docs or Slides and automatically sort the files into the correct folder by homeroom teacher.
To make figuring out what to do each day easier, I collected my lessons and projects from over the years and made them into Google Sites by grade level. Teachers could browse by skills required (ie., capital letters, spaces, punctuation) and pick a lesson or project on the fly. For each project, I also included a “formless” version of the project that teachers could assign in Google Classroom like their normal classwork. Unfortunately these formless versions lack the read-aloud support and built-in word banks of the Forms versions, but they still are a vast improvement over where we started many years ago in the lab on Microsoft Word.
Examples of recent formless projects can be found in the portfolio section of my website:
An example of a project with all the bells and whistles (word banks, read aloud, and Autocrat integration-ready) can be found here: