Old School Can Still Work

At Canterbury we are in the midst of a big push to integrate technology in the classroom. However, we are intentionally taking a balanced approach so that we aren't throwing the baby out with the bath water so to speak.

In 5th grade our writing curriculum steps up in terms of expectations and output. In Nadav Avital' (5th Grade Humanities and Composition) capable hands, however, students are guided step by step through a variety of different types of writing from research to personal narrative to expository and beyond. I was in his classroom this morning and was expecting some heavy techie work going on as they were discussing a writing strategy.

Instead, I found charts galore - fastened in all corners of the classroom - with examples, webs, highlights, and underlines to help the students as they wrote their own pieces. So, after an earlier post about how Google is enhancing the educational experience of our middle school students through the collaborative nature of its Apps, I wanted to take a moment to make sure everybody understood that the time-tested and effective pedagogical approaches are not being neglected in our classroom.