Welcome to my blog!

I’m starting my 36th year at Silver Lake Middle School in Kingston, Massachusetts. I taught 7th & 8th grade Mathematics for the first 11 years of my career. In 1985 I started a computer class which I have taught ever since. Needless to say technology has changed tremendously since the computer class was started. It has been a wonderful journey because the landscape is constantly changing.

We started with Radio Shack TRS-80s & Commodore Pets. We moved on to Apple IIes, Apple Macs, and then finally Windows machines. At first our software was simply the BASIC programming language and a word processor named Bank Street Writer. Through the years the software has evolved as well as the hardware. Somewhere along the way the Web was developed and now we have Web 2.0.

Every 7th grader at SLRMS takes the computer course for a third of the school year. The major emphasis of the course is to teach students to use the computer as a tool. Microsoft Office is the software used most often. Many times other subject area teachers and I will collaborate on a project. Frequently the librarian is involved as well. Our school has a 2nd computer lab adjacent to mine and many teachers bring their classes to work in that lab on a regular basis which allows students to continue to develop skills learned in my computer class.

You can’t get complacent or the technology will pass you by. I had made the conscious decision to avoid Facebook, Myspace and similar social networking sites. As educators, we had been told to be extremely careful or avoid participating in those sites altogether. Without realizing it, I lumped many of the new Web 2.0 technologies into the same category and as a result was missing out on a great deal. I am hoping that the course I am now taking, “The Three C’s of the 21st Century”, will help me to better understand many of these new tools and help me learn how to best use them for my personal as well as professional good.

CompTeach (Steve Hurlbut)