EDU 590

Hi Everyone,

This week I was teaching a lesson that was designed to help prepare the students for next month's MEAP test. It wasn't the most interesting lesson but it is a district requirement and I will admit that this type of reading comprehension practice serves a purpose. My students were reading an expository text article about the one-handed pitcher Jim Abbott. We read the article and as we were discussing I found my students asking a lot of questions about how he was able to pitch, field, and throw. They were fascinated by his ability to overcome this challenge but they couldn't quite wrap their minds around how he did it. So we decided to investigate a little further and we went online to find out more about him, view pictures, and hopefully watch a video that would clearly answer all our questions. This was all easily done and viewed because I am lucky enough to have a smartboard in my room. Much of what we were wondering was answered in our online quest. We read a little more about him and we looked at some pictures. The only problem was that the websites we were looking at had video footage of Jim Abbott in action available...only not to us because our access to these videos was blocked by the district. Everything I looked up came back to You Tube or some other site that we are not given access to. While I understand that some sites need to be blocked for content I was very frustrated that we could not access what we needed for this spontaneous teachable moment. Obviously I could have thought ahead and downloaded some video at my house to bring in but it would seem that the beauty of having the interenet and all of its information at our fingertips is that it is a resource for spontaneous moments. It would be nice if there was some way for districts to grant teachers access to some of these banned sites that actually offer great learning tools!