Today our meeting was small and fun. Many students were excused to attend musical speaking parts practice or to play in the fourth grade girls’ soccer game. First I introduced the students to the blog and explained that a blog is like an internet diary on a particular subject, in this case technology club meetings. They started to read my profile and were surprised that the information they read there was about my real life. ‘Look, Mrs. Shugan, you’re on the internet!’
Then I introduced the activity, which was taking apart some old computers that the technology department gave us. Having a small group was very helpful and I deliberately stepped back and let them discover how to take things apart, after cautioning them that they would need to put things back together at the end of the meeting. I asked them to see if they could name the parts as they were pulling them out. I set one of each pair to the task of finding an owner’s manual or a schematic to help us figure out what the parts are called. I was interested to see how well they would come up with good search terms to find this information. One of the students confidently announced that he would just Google it, and he had good results. However, initially skipping the Dell website, he selected sites that sell computer parts and do not show pictures of the parts, or show how they fit together in the computer case. I gave them few suggestions and I was happy to see that they easily found a drawing of the inside of the computer model they were working on. It had parts numbered and labeled and it was exactly what they needed to work well.
After they had put the parts back in and were lined up to go, I asked them what parts they had identified. They named: floppy disk drive, hard drive, internal speaker, motherboard, CD/DVD player, power supply, and the heat sink and blower. Next time, I think I will ask those students who know how to tear apart the computer to show the students who were absent today what they did. I will have them all find information on the internet to explain what the parts do. This will be a good opportunity to discuss effective search terms and to practice the skill of previewing the description and the web site address to assess its effectiveness. I want to do less explaining and let them do more experimenting than I would in a lesson. For tech club, the process is the lesson.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
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