My Excellent Adventure Teaching with Multimedia

In 1998, I started teaching computer applications to all classes in the Catolica Activa School in San José, Costa Rica. I had to teach Microworlds from first to third grade, Iyulú in fourth and fifth grade, Windows in sixth grade, and Power Point in eighth grade. Iyulú is the authoring environment that is now published as CREATE Together.

Everything was perfect. I planned my lessons every week and I had everything under control but during that year I found that children got bored learning Iyulú the way that I was teaching them. With Power Point I would tell the children to prepare a presentation, providing step by step instructions on the blackboard. I then assumed that the children knew how to make a presentation.

I made this mistake with Iyulú. It was a little hard for me to learn it, so I assumed it would be hard for my students. I made them make notes week by week about what was Iyulú, what the menus were for, how to use the buttons, and so on. Each lesson, the students would take notes and then practice what they learned on the computer. At the end of each lesson, the practice was sent to the recycle bin.

I felt my students learned technical facts but they did not enjoy their learning. They were always telling me they were bored of copying so much information from the board.

The next year, I decided I would use Iyulú differently. I decided to teach Iyulú to the young children the way I taught Power Point to older children. I told my students to get in groups and explained that we were going to learn to use a tool that can create games. The project for that year would be to prepare a game for younger children to play. I explained the steps they had to follow:

1. My students interviewed the younger children’s teachers asking them which topics they studied to identify topics to use for games.

2. They chose a topic and started investigating it on the Internet, asking their parents and relatives about it, and reading books and magazines.

3. They prepared written reports on each topic with an introduction, body, conclusion, and bibliography.

4. They brought their reports to me to check them and then shared them with their classmates. Everybody learned the other groups’ topics – if someone found information that can be used by another group, it was shared.

5. After checking the students’ reports, I went group by group and told them: "Okay, you have the background information. Now I want you to imagine your topic in a game. Try to draw page by page how you want your game to look."

6. They drew screen by screen. I gave them ideas and I heard groups giving ideas to other groups. It was amazing the way the students assumed their responsibility and the way they shared.

We started creating the games and day by day children learned something new. It was not easy because I didn’t have any assistant to help me. I had classes of 30 students at a time, and everybody wanted me to help them.

The students continued to make notes but I was not telling them what to record – they recorded what they thought was important for them to know. They were working toward a goal, to program a game other children were going to use for learning. They were no longer just learning how to do something and sending their work to the recycle bin.

This experience was the best thing that ever happened to me. I felt my students were now my friends and they felt the same about me. Even at recess time, we would discuss their games and review their new ideas – I never asked for them, they looked for me. The students were happy, they were enjoying the experience and most importantly, they were learning!

The students loved my classes. Sometimes other teachers asked me, "What do you do with your students? They’re always talking about you and your classroom and they are not having their recess because they prefer to go to your lab." It was amazing. When the bell rang, children ran to my lab and they got in lines to wait for me. Sometimes I couldn’t let everybody in, so I had to invent a "ticket" to be fair and give everybody turns during the week.

The students loved the job they were doing, and they felt important doing it. Children that had a poor self-image felt more confident after this experience.

Parents became involved in their children’s learning. I sent notes telling parents how well their kids worked and they sometimes visited my classroom. When the games were finished, the Iyulú developers Creadisa invited important people from Education in Costa Rica. Parents and the school´s principal also came to see the games. That day, my students realized they were making history. We were the first school to use Iyulú that way: not just learning it but creating with it.

This was the same year Bytes of Learning visited us and were so impressed with the work we had done. This was when I learned that Iyulú was being developed for publication as CREATE Together.

After this experience everybody at school wanted to use Iyulú, and I felt satisfied with my job. The next year, my new fifth graders started the same process of making learning games. This time, Creadisa’s Estrellita Vargas came to the school and took the children’s pictures. We added the pictures to their games so everybody would know which students created the games.

Before starting the year, Estrellita gave me the idea of making a searchable CD-ROM yearbook with Iyulú. That year I worked with Iyulú with fifth and sixth graders who planned the yearbook together. Children made groups to pick their classmates’ pictures and write their stories. Everybody worked hard, and Estrellita helped us put the information together using the new CREATE Together. In plenty of time, we finished the electronic school yearbook and placed it on the Internet, another first!

In 2001, I took a position teaching at Saint Jude School. It was really hard to leave my former students. Teachers told me that the first day of school, students were looking for me and they got sad when they knew that I was gone. Sometimes they still visit the Saint Jude School and they run to my classroom. Our deep friendship continues. The thing that makes me happiest is that the students didn’t just learn computer applications – they learned values too. They learned how to be a friend, they learned to care for others, to respect other people’s choices and ideas, to listen to others and not just talk. And they enjoyed every part of the learning experience!

Saint Jude School gave me a multiage classroom with children from preparatory, first and second grade. It was amazing how things happened.

Giana, a second grader, had been studying the solar system. She liked it but she told me she wanted to investigate more because she knows things that were not in the books. I remembered CREATE Together and asked the students if they wanted to make games for the little ones using the computer. Giana told me little children were not going to understand her game because she wanted it to be hard, so we decided to make games for both the little children and for the older primary students. The day we were choosing topics for the games, Paola jumped up and said she wanted it to be about phonics, Daniel about math and my son Daniel about natural disasters. Mario was the only one who didn’t know which topic to use so I sent him to teacher Arlette’s classroom to ask her for a topic for her students. Arlette asked Mario to make a game about colors.

I have always seen the computer as an important tool in the classroom. Among other applications, we have used it for Spanish, math, music and science learning. We cannot ignore the computer because children are born with it. They know how to use it better than we do. So when I told my students we are going to use the computer to make games and learn from them, they saw this as a natural and familiar application of the computer.

We planned for the games at St. Jude School the same way we did at Catolica Activa. I told the children to think about the games they wanted to make. They could ask their family members, and they could investigate using books, the Internet, magazines, and other sources. The week after I told them, I received a lot of help from parents that were motivated by their children. Parents told me they visited the Internet and they learned things together with their children. Paola´s mother helped her daughter plan the screens for the phonics game.

It was amazing when parents picked their children up from school. They couldn’t leave before children showed them what they created that day.

I must be honest. I never read anything from a manual – I did not even have one for CREATE Together. We learned to use the CREATE Together tool on the way and together.

I remember once we were concentrating trying to figure out how to do something. Then Giana said, "I got it, why don’t you put the object…" That day we all learned something new from Giana. I’ve tried to make my students discover that we can all learn from one another, not that they can only learn from the teacher.

Never before have I observed children as co-operative with each other as they have been after using CREATE Together. Daniel brought a book about phonics for Paola. Giana gave Daniel a book about natural disasters. Paola had a book about the solar system, which she gave to Giana. The children’s parents told me children were always talking about their games and their classmates’ games.

Teachers from Saint Jude School also helped. From time to time, they worked with the other children when I had to work alone with one of my students. The CREATE Together developers helped me too. I still hadn’t read a manual and I had many questions to answer.

My children would go outside and tell the other children that the next year they were going to use games that my students have made. Sometimes during recess, like at the Catolica school, the children preferred to stay in the classroom working on CREATE Together. We learned from every game so I didn’t have to spend extra time teaching about the solar system or natural disasters because we used the children’s games to study them.

I was satisfied because as we used CREATE Together, the children learned a lot more: They learned how to navigate on the Internet, how to use the Print Screen button, they learned to paste things on Paint, then cut them and use them in CREATE Together. They learned to record their voices, and add sounds to their projects. They learned more using CREATE Together than if I had to teach them those skills in separate lessons. They learned the skills far better because they were using them for a purpose, which was significant to them and others.

CREATE Together has helped me enjoy what I teach and I am planning to help my colleagues to use it in their classrooms too. This year I am going to work with kindergarten and preparatory students but I will continue working with my primary students in the afternoon.

I want to thank Estrellita, Alonso, Alvaro and Dr. Aguëro from Creadisa the developers of CREATE Together, and thank the publisher Bytes of Learning too for giving me the opportunity to use and learn this great tool. I am willing to help Bytes of Learning tell others what an amazing tool CREATE Together is because, if teachers are making children learn without creating, they are wasting children´s minds.

While supplies last, a CD-ROM of the CREATE Together activities created by Laura Grillo’s St. Jude School students is available from Bytes of Learning. Contactcustomer service.