My Technotastic Lesson...

This Thursday, I taught my science/technology lesson. Of course, I had to send out an e-mail to the administrator earlier in the week to access the videos on YouTube, which I thought was because the videos might show something inappropriate, but apparently it's because they recommend that teachers not use YouTube videos for copyright reasons. It seems strange to me that if I go to the website, where anyone can view videos, and show videos to 21 five and six-year-olds, that there would be a copyright issue. Nonetheless, the administrators didn't tell me about that issue, or even tell me that they'd decided not to unblock the site, until I was frantically trying to figure out why the videos weren't working an hour before the lesson was supposed to begin. They ended up allowing me to access the websites for a few hours, which was, at least, enough to let me teach the lesson.
The videos made a big difference in the lesson. After we read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," the kids had a lot of questions about how a caterpillar makes a chrysalis and how the butterfly gets out of a chrysalis, and it's sometimes difficult to explain those kinds of things to kindergartners in words that they'll understand. So, the videos were a big help when it came to teaching the kids about some of the more complex aspects of the butterfly life cycle, and they're still to young to be sick of PowerPoints yet!
Throughout the lesson, I kept an eye out for who wasn't catching on to the concepts, because I was planning to pull up to five of them to do the webquest that I put together. I was actually surprised about which kids I ended up having to pull out of the class for more help. One of the kids is so quiet that I'd never really noticed that she has trouble paying attention and needs more time to absorb new information. The other little girl is one of the best students in the class, quick and well-behaved, and comfortable asking questions, but she was having a lot of trouble with this particular concept. The third student was a little boy who often has a little bit of trouble in lessons, but he's smart, and when he gets a little bit of extra help he does very well.
So, I took the three students who were struggling to the core computers, so that they wouldn't distract the other students while they worked on the computers. They go to computer class once a week, so by this point in the semester, they'd already learned a lot about computers. I read each little intro to them and then told them to click on the link under the intro. They knew what it meant to click on the back button, and to scroll down or up, so my job wasn't very difficult. I just helped with the reading, and the occasional double or triple click on the back button that sent them to my wiki's homepage or the school's homepage. It went really smoothly, the kids liked the extra time at the computers, and they all left the lesson knowing the four main stages of a butterfly's life cycle and the order that they go in, which was the goal of the overall lesson, and they liked the one-on one time with me and getting to use the computers.