I recently had the pleasure to hear from a couple students in our district on how technology has supported and empowered them as learners. Last week, our TESLA Inquiry Group (TESLA = Technology to Enhance Student Learning & Achievement) met at Rutland Elementary School to continue our learning inquiry on how educators in SD23 can best leverage technology to enhance student learning. Stefani Oakes (teacher at RLE) kindly offered to have 2 students join us for our meeting. Both the students were in Stefani’s class last year and had some powerful stories to share on how they each leveraged technology (in this case Google Read & Write) to support their learning.

*For those of you that are not familiar with Google Read & Write, it’s a Chrome Extension that supports all learners with powerful technology functions such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, word prediction, and so much more. To learn more, check out our SD23 GSuite website (CLICK HERE).

Now in guiding the students in their sharing with our TESLA Inquiry Group, Stefani asked them each to describe what reading and writing was like before using the Google Read & Write tool.  The first young boy, said but one word, and that one word continues to resonate with me.  

That word was “meh”.  

This one word said so very much! It wasn’t even so much the word, it was how he said it. You could hear the apathy around the writing process that he felt before leveraging this technology. He went on to express that he wrote very little and on many occasions didn’t get anything down on paper at all. Imagine that one of the main methods that we ask students to share their learning/thinking (i.e. writing) wasn’t easily accessible to you. I know that I would no doubt feel disengaged, discouraged, and disheartened about my learning… I would truly feel “meh”.

The story thankfully didn’t end there. The student’s teacher, Stefani, brought in Google Read & Write as a tool that all learners in her classroom could leverage to support their learning. Many students selectively used features of Google Read & Write throughout the year, and this one boy in particular went from writing almost nothing, to in his words “with the tool, my writing keeps growing and growing”.  How awesome is that?!  Such a great example of technology’s true role in education (i.e. supporting, empowering, and ultimately enhancing the learning experience for all students).