Carpe Diem

This was a very interesting webinar. I often wish our school used more technology in the classrooms. I would love for our students to be able to use ipads or itouches. I remember a few years ago when my brother was in elementary school his school was a part of a pilot program for the i pod touch in classrooms. The Carpe Diem school seemed a little extreme. I understand test scores are going up but for one half of the day to be in front of the computer screen I agree with the presenter that they are loosing those critical thinking skills. I think I would be very happy to work in a school like St. Marys. I love the idea of blending the technology with the hands of learning. I don't think I could work in the Carpe Diem school it seems boring to me. The only example of the Carpe Diem model that I can think of that we use in our own school is when the students use the SME math program during the computer lab time to run math drills. I wish we had more technology in our school to do more of the St. Marys model but I plan a lot of lessons using our Promethean board. The other day I taught a lesson about ordinal numbers where as a class the kids took turns playing games on the board to practice these skills. If I had the power I would push our school to invest in class sets of ipads. There is such cool stuff I see about ipads in the classroom on pinterest that I would love to try out. I could see my self very smoothly transitioning into a blend of these two models. I use the Promethean board much more than most teachers at my school and I would love to expose my kids to more.