Pre-K Technology Standards

     The Texas Pre-K guidelines, lay the foundation for all other curriculum standards. These standards are broken into five different areas, Social and emotional development, language and communication, emergent literacy: reading, emergent literacy: writing and mathematics. Social and emotional development deals with giving the students the  skills needed to help them control themselves and to make them more comfortable in the class setting.  The language and communication setting deals with having students learn to communicate appropriately. Their language skills such as speech are scaffolded to build upon each other. Emergent literacy: reading allows for students to become comfortable with concepts of print.  Students are able to see and hear teachers reading to them and modeling good reading.  They also start to learn about phonological awareness.  Emergent Literacy: Writing deals with getting them to start writing and getting them used to being comfortable with what they are writing.  Students are increasingly more comfortable with what they are writing and the letters they are forming and are constantly building upon these.  The last domain is Mathematics. Here students are introduced to the very basic of math skills. Students are able to work math activities  that are integrated into the curriculum.
     The Pre-K TEKS lay a foundation or the K-12 teachers to work on the curriculum before them and allow the students to be successful.  In Pre-K, students are given the opportunity to become comfortable in the skills they will soon be working on.  Giving the students this opportunity will help them when they start using technology.
     A spiraling or scaffolding curriculum is a curriculum that continually builds upon itself.  In the case of the Technology Application Standards, students start with a basic understanding in the lower grades and continually build upon those skill as they progress each year.  For example, In kindergarten though second grade, students in the information acquisition strand are expected to know how to acquire information using a variety of sources including audio, text, video and graphics (TEK 5a).  When looking at this same strand in grades 3 through 5, the same skills are expected.  Looking at grades 6 through 8, students are expected to build upon these skills previously expected for mastery and they are now given more specific audio sources and graphic media to use (TEK 5 a and b).  They are expected to know if they should use a bit map file or a jpeg file. They are also expected to use and access remote storage devices. Finally, in grades 9 through 12, students are building even more upon these previous skills.  They are now expected to use the same skills used to acquire information and this time apply it to programming projects (TEK 5b). In this curriculum the students are constantly building upon given expectations and given multiple opportunities to master them.