Ms. Skinner’s first grade students are doing great with logging into the computers with their own usernamses (this starts in 1st grade). Today they brought poems they had written to publish using Microsoft Word.
Ms. Perch’s 2nd graders are working on their desktop publishing skills by typing one of the stories from language arts in Microsoft Word. Besides keyboarding, they are reinforcing basic editing skills such as changing font attributes (e.g. size, color, and type) and inserting graphics.
These second grade students in Ms. Sweet’s class are customizing and publishing their poems using Microsoft Word. While this may seem like a simple use of technology integration, it requires our younger students to learn and exercise many basic, yet critical, technological skills. Just to personalize and publish a poem, these students must know how to: log-on to a computer, choose the appropriate application, enter text, edit/format text (font type, color, and size), print, save to their network folder and be able to retrieve a file from that folder. All of these are required in the technology section of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills or TEKS for grades K – 2 as stepping stones to more advanced technologic applications.
