Ed Tech Bits and Bytes: Teaching Technology to Kindergarten

When I first learned that kindergarten was part of my course load this year I cringed with fear. Kindergarten Teachers are a rear and special bread of teachers. They're so young and still just learning how to be in school, add to that nearly all of these kids were new or fairly new to the English Language and you might begin to understand my fear. How was I going to teach them? Where should I start? In the end I opted to skip teaching them how to turn on the computers (smart move since a month in we got all new computers that get turned on in a completely different manner). I decided to start with mouse. Yes the mouse. Since we don't have tablets or touch screens it was the most logical place to start.

I found some wonderful websites to help build mousing skills. I set things ups and was ready to go with my Kinders or so I thought...I got them on the computers and some did a wonderful job and had great fun playing the mousing skill games. Others had no clue how to hold a mouse let alone understand the difference between a left click and a right click. So I went back to the drawing board. I searched the resources left for me by Jen Simon and stumbled upon a Mouse Handling Activity that she had found on Teachers Pay Teachers. I printed out the activity part and cut out the mice and glued on tails. I then went in search of a video or song to help the kids understand how to use a mouse and found the My Computer Mouse Song.

For the next session I went into the Kindergarten classrooms, as my lab was far too small to do anything except be on computers. I played the song a few times for the kids then they went to their tables and we did the Mouse Handling Activity. With the help of the classroom teachers we got most of the kids understanding how to hold the mouse and what a right click was.

Armed with their new mousing skill we met in the lab the following session and tried our mousing skill website with far greater success. Now, don't get the wrong idea I still have kids who don't know left from right or even how to properly hold the mouse, but for several of the kids the offline activity helped them gain some valuable vocabulary and comfort needed to start to be successful on the computers.