Week Three: Topic (Educational Technology), Module (Microsoft’s Backyard) – Clip: Classroom Management Software

Class server assists teachers, students, and parents with teaching and learning in numerous ways. For teachers, they are able to use resources in innovative ways to create assignments and activities. Afterwards, teachers can add these assignments and other resources to a server via his or her website. Teachers are still instructing students but through a different mode of delivery. In fact, the teacher in the video believes that this was an effective means of taking the “teacher out of the loop.” Her statement was based on how she no longer has to grade certain assessments and assignments that were more objective because the program was capable of giving students immediate feedback.

For students, the class server enables them to perform their assignments on the computer. According to a student in the video, he enjoyed doing reports on the computer opposed to having to handwrite his report. Since students were able to do their assignments on the computer, they were able to be more creative, innovative, incorporate animation, special effects, and many more details. It is also useful for students to be able to receive immediate feedback from doing certain assignments on the server.

For parents, they are able to keep up with their child’s classroom performance because these students were receiving immediate feedback. This is advantageous for both students and parents because they no longer have to wait until parent-teacher conference to learn about the child’s progress.

The advantages that this type of classroom management tool could offer a school district are meeting students with differentiated learning styles, creating tailor-made assignments for each student, and reducing the number of photocopying that each teacher makes. First of all, this classroom management tool could help students that have various learning styles to excel in the classroom. This tool incorporates interactive learning that would maintain students’ attention. Additionally, the authentic assessments could help all students to become successful in the classroom. Secondly, teachers are able to create assignments based on individual student’s needs. Therefore, a teacher could assign certain assignments to some students and more advanced assignments to other students based on their classroom progress. Lastly, this type of classroom management tool could offer a school district a reduction in budget. When teachers store assignments and other resources on the server, then it means that teachers no longer have to run to the photocopier machine to waste precious resources.

My overall feeling about using such type of tool to manage instruction is pretty optimistic. I believe that this could be a great resource for many school districts that have a desire of becoming more technologically savvy. I also believe that this could help to improve parental involvement because parents would be able to access their child’s electronic portfolio at their leisure. Additionally, I believe that students would be able to learn more because technology is both an invaluable resource and quite entertaining to many students.

I only foresee one obstacle in using such classroom management tool which is the lack of financial resources for all school districts to use this tool. Even if school districts are able to use this particular classroom management tool, it may be a problem for students to do their assignments outside of the classroom if they do not have a home computer.