I was in a fourth grade classroom with five computers on the side wall. The students were able to log in with a generic password. After they did, I looked for MS Office Suite on each computer. Four of the five had 2007 and one had 2010. But, the students were not using the MS Software! This took me back ten years to when I first started showing teachers what they already had on their computers. Echoes of "I'm not sure that we have PowerPoint ..." came to me from Illinois, where I first started consulting.
So, I opened up the PowerPoint template on one of the computers and selected a color template. As I called roll I invited each of the students to come up and type in their first name. As I watched, not one of the students used the Caps Lock or Shift keys to make the first letter in their name a capital (upper case). Every one of them used one finger of one hand to type their name. Not one of them pressed the space bar or pressed the Enter key, which would have automatically changed the first letter of their name to a capital.
The MS Office Suite came preinstalled on many or most of these classroom computers, yet so many teachers are not using them to their full capacity to reinforce Common Core Curriculum in their classrooms. I really need to get the word out.
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