My Interview With A Second Grade Teacher Ms. Hayes

Last week I interviewed a second grade teacher Ms. Hayes in James elementary school. This school was my kids’ school so I know most the teachers who work there. Ms. Hayes was a very nice and respectful lady who was welcome to interview her and make my observation about second grader. In that time I spent four hours with cute and smart students. Ms. Hayes’ classroom has twenty student’s seven girls and thirteen boys along with a wide variety of cultures. There were many different religious beliefs, family backgrounds, nationalities, races, social classes, and personality’s, represented in the class. I noticed there was one student from the Middle East and eight of them are Hispanic, and other students were American some white while others were

Ms. Hayes said, “I have many technology devices such as smartboards, iPads, TV and laptops. So we use all these devices with most lessons. Also she explained that the whole point of these digital tools is to make teaching and learning easy for me and my students, so all these devices are loaded with many teaching programs including Imagine Learning, Pearson, and many more educational programs that help students develop their knowledge. In addition, I noticed they practiced good reading activities, great online reading games that make learning to read interesting and engaging for kids as Reading Egg and Raz-Kids. Then I sked Ms. Hayes about how are audio and visual elements integrated into teaching and learning. She said, “I always incorporate audio and visual elements into my teaching styles at most lessons especially reading and math”. For instance I observed the first hour of math lesson Ms. She showed me how she use the YouTube links to explain some math problems. Then she asked her students to sit on the colorful rug that on the front of the white board. I noticed that the students took about five minutes to sit there then she gave them a hand out each students take one. These hand out include addition examples and many addition problems, so before she explain these

Ms. Hayes said, “As educators, the use of Web 2.0 tools is changing our work, and more specifically the way we support students in the classroom, so I think technology now play a good role to support teaching and learning. In addition she explain all schools now try to bring more technology into their classrooms, so teachers will in turn try to put more technology in their students’ hands. However a second grade students use many different programs and software as Microsoft Word. PowerPoint, StoryBird, VoiceThread, OneNote and others. The next was, Is professional development opportunities available for the teacher to become skilled in implementation and use of education technologies? Ms. Hayes believed that technology offers the opportunity for teachers to become more collaborative and extend learning not just into classroom but out the classroom too, so she thought most teachers like more technology in their classrooms, and roughly some of educators lack the training especially over fifty is one of the biggest barriers to incorporating technology into their teaching. She explain that the education institutions responsible to create a training programs that support educators to be capable of selecting, evaluating, and using appropriate technologies and resources. They also should pay special care to make sure that educators understand the privacy and security concerns associated with technology.