Kids are Flexible

Today, I was introducing a project one of our classes will be working on involving National Parks across the United States.  We are in the early planning stages of the project, but today, students (grades 4/5) were given a map containing all of the National Parks.  They were to look around and find three that they would be interested in researching.  After making a decision on their 3 choices, the students were to email me the list.  With this information in hand, the classroom teacher and I would be able to assign a park to a student or to a group of students.  I introduced email to these students last week so this was only their second time using their school email account.  For most of these students, this was their second EVER use of email.  They picked it up fairly quickly, which I’m happy about.

With 5 minutes left in class, my brain started working and I realized how much time it was going to take me to organize all of the information the students were emailing me.  Then, the light bulb went off – Why didn’t I create a form in Google Docs and have the students enter their information there?  I very quickly created the form, showed it to the students, and told them to fill it out in the remaining few minutes of class.  Many moaned and said they already sent the information and didn’t want to do it again.  When I told them that 2 minutes of their time would save me at least 45 minutes of my time later, they were okay with it.  I sent the link to the form out to all of the students using our lab monitoring software and we were good to go.  Almost all of the students successfully completed the form and the data was collected in a matter of time.

I have to thank the flexibility of the students for shifting gears in a matter of minutes and completing the simply task of filling out a brief form.  We need to keep in mind the abilities of our students and realize that they can learn quickly and on the fly.  We have to be just as flexible.