As many of you know, when the school year ended this year, the doors closed forever on St. Peter Claver High School. So, my technology integration examples will be given about a school that closed because of poorly managed debt...maybe our technology spending wasn't so savvy??
From the outside walls, SPC looked simple and small. If you didn't come inside you would never know that every classroom was equipped with a Promethean Board for daily instruction. In addition to the boards, every 2 classrooms shared a set of clickers for student interaction and the school owned 4 slates for teacher instruction on the boards.
The Promethean Board, much like a Smart Board, allows me to teach math interactively. I can draw shapes and graphs accurately, create figures quickly and teach lessons with color and sound that keeps students engaged. Having this board in every classroom helps all of our teachers get better at planning all of our lessons around it and helping each other find out all of the amazing capabilities of it.
Instead of full classroom integration of computers, SPC utilized laptop carts for our students (aside from one computer lab for computer/business class). We had one laptop cart strictly for the English department and 2 others for any classes to sign out at any time. With only 200 students this was plenty of computers for everyone!
I feel there are pros and cons to the laptop carts.
Some pros are:
- Computers can be planned in to virtually any lesson
- Computers don't sit idle if not planned for that day
- Students can use computers before/after school in any classroom
- Software for different content areas can be loaded on all computers
- Students can save under their own user name with any laptop in the cart for later use
Some cons are:
- A great deal of class time can be used up with logging on and off
- Maintenance was always an issue for us on the laptops in the cart
- If the laptops were used in the previous period, they often aren't charged enough for the next class
- Sometimes, all laptops are signed out when you have a plan to use them for an activity.
Hi Mary,
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, I've come to the personal conclusion that each school has different needs, practices, and funding. Because of that, what is good for my school may not be good for yours. The cons on your list are also cons for non-mobile computer labs as well. Our school improvement teams just today discussed providing ipads or ipods to all our students. This would most likely be class sets like 30 assigned to me. The idea was to incorporate technology being used today by our students to enhance teaching and learning. Because our school in the past has not had many issues with funding, this seemed possible, but even we had cuts this year. So the discussion then was "what technologies can be used to enhance instruction and learning that we already have or can add to?" We had great discussions. Because of the school demographics where I teach allow for much community and parental support, one laptop per child or portal lab is something we are interested in. Will it happen? I believe to some degree and also depending on teacher expertise. Have technologies that just "sit" and are not used is a shame. In the end, any technology that enhances learning and instruction in my opinion should be used and practiced.
Mary and Ceic you both have good points. I realized when answering the spending question a few weeks ago that for all the great technology which I could outfit a classroom (or a school with) with it was a whole other issue to be able to implement all that technology each day. There needs to be a happy medium between having enough technology to meet the needs, but not so much that technology sits unused on a regular basis. I think that it is also important to realize that while there is great hardware out there is amplify teaching the bottom line is important too and instead of a smartboard or promethean maybe a few more years of a projecting presentation on a white board is not so bad.
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