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Background
In December 2001,
Lucy Salerno
joined the Information Services Department to implement the Technology
Innovation Challenge Grant. The Technology Titans of Travis project calls
for integrating technology into curriculum and instruction by the classroom
teacher. Ms. Salerno has been
working at various
Elementary Schools
implementing the grant and training teachers how to integrate technology
with the California State Standards and their classroom curriculum.
Teachers chose their own projects which currently range from
PowerPoint Presentations, Travel Brochures, Plays, and Book Reports, to
animation, narration, and creating their own videos.
Why? It’s great fun,
the children love it, and it gives the teacher an alternative method of
evaluating student learning. It helps
prepare our children for living and working in a world of ever-changing
technological advances and it helps cross the digital divide.
The students and teachers at
these schools are excited about the possibilities with computers.
The amount of writing has increased – students suddenly have so
much to say! State projects are
no longer long, hand-written reports that are often thrown away at the end
of the year. Many of these reports have
turned into web searches, graphs, charts, verbal explanations, narrative
writing - multimedia presentations. Children
are creating graphs using Microsoft Excel 2000 to enter, manipulate,
calculate, and graph data, then explaining what they did,
why they did it, and what the results mean. They’ve use the World Wide
Web, Encyclopedias, Inspiration, Kidspix, Hyperstudo, Powerpoint, Excel, and
Logo softare. Students can edit graphics, import movies, take digital
movies or digital images and import them into the presentations.
A second grade teacher has her students create
multimedia book reports narrated by the students. The projects were
shown at Open House. However, due the 911 and the war in Iraq, one
child's parents were both deployed overseas and he was in tears because they
would not get to see his work. The teacher, Mrs. Budish, emailed the
project to his parents using their military email address. The child's
parents were able to see a picture of their child, hear his voice, and read
his book report from the other side of the world. Now it was their
turn to be in tears. Wow, global technology in 2nd grade!
In a 5th grade classroom, children learned about Space Science.
They had to figure out how to represent the concept of an orbit,
illustrate it on the computer, and finally animate the earth’s orbit
around the sun. They animated
and explained the relationship between gravity and inertia and put
everything in a PowerPoint Presentation.
Now, that is student learning in action!
This activity culminated with a trip to the Discovery Museum
Challenger Mission in Sacramento
.
Other teachers are teaching a unit and dividing the
students into groups to delve deeper into the content.
Each group is responsible for researching one topic.
However, the difference with this project is that the students will
explain the topic, not in writing, but with the use of a video camera.
These student videos were put together to show what students have
learned from their research focused on the California Gold Rush and Healthy
Living.
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