How Do We Teach Without Technology?

Here we are, May 2011. Computers and digital tools and data are everywhere... on our desks, in our backpacks, in our pockets, in our cars.

I worked with first and second grades yesterday and we were using online collaborative tools. The task was simple, several students writing sentences about frogs on a single document. At first, they were apprehensive and unsure, "hey someone else is writing on my paper!" was heard from several students-- and several rooms as we had spread the students out to get the idea of collaboration at a distance. Soon they had the idea and were chatting with each other to point out mistakes, and the smiles were amazing when they saw that someone had fixed a mistake they had pointed out.

Then in came my middle school kids--who are a wonderful group of seventh graders who try anything and everything I give them and they have a great sense of humor and are risk-takers. I told them to open up a spreadsheet so that we could first gather some information from their play of Spent, then practice graphing the data. The students told me they had not made a spreadsheet all year!

I am really unsure how one can claim to be teaching math in 2011 without giving students experience creating spreadsheets and programming them to manipulate the data.