Reading Online: International Perspectives -- Getting Kindergarteners Started with Technology

Getting Kindergarteners Started with Technology: The Story of One School

Every Thursday -- well, almost every Thursday -- I become the in-school “critical friend” of an urban elementary school in Sydney, Australia. The school population is more than 1000 children from kindergarten to Grade 6, a very high percentage of whom come from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

I mostly spend my time in one kindergarten class, observing the children as they come to grips with speaking English and reading and writing in English. I am particularly interested in how the teacher has integrated technology into her literacy curriculum. So, over the past 2 years, I have been taking two or three children to the computer each week to work with them during their morning literacy session. One outcome of these morning periods has been my realization of how difficult it is for the classroom teacher to organize the children at the computers when I am not there. While some children have very good computer knowledge, others have little, and the teacher can not leave the rest of the class to work with only a few children at the computer.

Related Postings from the Archives

Connecting a Computer Center to Themes, Literature, and Kindergartners’ Literacy Needs by Linda Labbo and Linda Sprague
Kindergarten Stories by Susan Caroff, Patricia Kiefer, and Jennifer Roccograndi
Review of Kid Pix Studio Deluxe by Natalie Trusdell

In discussions with the teacher, I realized that I had knowledge about the children’s computer skills that she didn’t have -- and wouldn’t get, unless someone like me observed the children and noted what they could and could not do. And so I began systematically to observe the children, noting such things as whether they used the mouse, navigated their way confidently around a screen, and so on.

When I finished, I had some useful information that allowed the teacher to group the children so they could work in pairs at the computer without her on the days I wasn’t there to monitor them. Confident and skilled users were paired with students who had hardly touched a computer. Computer etiquette was talked about and a chart made of the importance of people having their turn, helping each other, and so on. This simple organizational procedure was a great success, and the children developed their ability to use the computer and the software programs (mostly “talking books” on CD-ROM) by leaps and bounds. Around the middle of the year I introduced KidPix to several groups, who in turn soon taught the others how to use this popular multimedia composing software. The teacher was happy, the children were happy, and technology was taking on a more purposeful role in the literacy curriculum.

Setting up the Kindergarten Volunteer Program

But what about the other four kindergarten classes? How could we do the same in all classrooms? These questions led me and the coordinator of the kindergarten teachers to set up a kindergarten volunteer program.

Creating the Tools

First I had to tidy up the checklist I had used the year before when observing students. I decided to draw the analogy with Clay’s (1972) concepts of print. All the teachers knew about these checklists and, in fact, used them to gauge their incoming kindergartener’s book knowledge. I drew up a summary of these for the teachers.

Figure 1
Summary of Clay's Concepts of Print

Directionality		Moves from top to bottom line by line
		Left page is read before right page
Words	Identify a word
	One-to-one matching
	Word sequence
Letters	Identify a letter
	One-to-one matching
	Letter sequence to match word
	First and last letter in word
	Capital letter		Identify capital letter
			Match uppercase with lowercase letters
Punctuation	Period
	Comma
	Quotation marks
	Exclamation mark

I then returned to the data I had collected and came up with a checklist to monitor the children’s development of “concepts of screen.” This checklist was given to the teachers for their perusal and comment. A few word changes were made, but the original concepts were changed very little. The teachers did ask for a section to record information about the students’ computer use at home.

Figure 2
Concepts of Screen Checklist

Child’s name: ______________________ Date: ____________

Skills			Not yet	Can do with help	Beginning to do on own	Can do on own
Mouse	Move mouse with one hand
	Use index finger on left side of mouse
	Match mouse and cursor
	Use mouse to click in right place
	Use double click to open icons
	Use click and drag
Programs	Turn on computer
	Locate appropriate program on desktop
	Open program
	Close program
Navigation	Recognize basic icons and their function	Cross to close
		Next page
		Next activity
Directionality	Scroll
	Knows how to move to an activity

Computer at Home

Yes

Programs child uses at home

Confidence	Seems frightened of computer	Prepared to observe others and try	Quite confident	Very confident

Any other points of interest that you’ve noticed (e.g., helping others, very interested in activity):

Calling for Volunteers

Next, we called for volunteers. An invitation went home to the families and caregivers of all kindergarten and Grade 1 children. This invitation explained what the volunteers were to do and who could be a volunteer -- parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and even older brothers and sisters. It also made it clear that the volunteers had to be willing to give up 1-2 hours a week on a regular basis, and have at least basic English and computer skills. Interested volunteers were invited to attend an information hour. This was organized for a day I would be in the school, for the hour just before the kindergarten children finished school.

We were thrilled with the attendance at the information hour, given that many of the children’s parents both worked outside the home, that grandparents tended to look after the children before and after school, and that many families were not confident English speakers. During this hour the deputy principal and I spoke in more detail about the importance of helping kindergarten children use the computers and why this was a difficult task for the classroom teacher. Nine people signed up as classroom volunteers at the end of the session.

Setting up Workshops

photo of volunteer working with child Several workshops were then held to explain what the volunteers were to do in the classrooms and to outline the rules of operation. For instance, while the volunteer might be in his or her own child’s classroom, discipline of that child -- or any other child -- was the responsibility of the teacher. Volunteers were not to talk to other parents about the children they were observing, and so on. Another major purpose of the workshops was to take the volunteers to the computers and examine one of the talking books on the school’s network while considering what each of the concepts of screen would look like. We had great fun at these workshops. The volunteers helped one another, and exchanged phone numbers in case they needed more help. We were ready to start in the classrooms.

After a tentative start for some, the volunteers were soon working with all the children in their allocated class. Teachers were thrilled with the information they gained from the volunteers and used it to group children appropriately. Children who showed little confidence were provided with additional time with the volunteers so that by the beginning of second term (approximately the 11th week of the school year) the use of the computer became a more integral part of the literacy curriculum.

Since then more volunteers have come forward to help. More workshops will be organized to show the volunteers how to incorporate digitized photos from field trips into word-processed documents so the children can write about their experiences. Teachers and volunteers have many ideas about how to move forward. What is exciting is that the children are using the computers in kindergarten far more confidently and more often than they have in the past. And the volunteers want to keep coming!

Reference

Clay, M. (1972). The early detection of reading difficulties: A diagnostic survey with recovery procedures (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Citation: Turbill, J. (2001, July/August). Getting kindergarteners started with technology: The story of one school. Reading Online, 5(1). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/international/inter_index.asp?HREF=turbill2/index.html