Once upon a time, sixth-grade research reports were delivered in monotone by fidgety 11-year-olds, standing alone in front of their classes and occasionally pointing to crayon-illustrated posters.
At Fairfax County’s Mantua Elementary School, one
Once upon a time, sixth-grade research reports were delivered in monotone by fidgety 11-year-olds, standing alone in front of their classes and occasionally pointing to crayon-illustrated posters.
At Fairfax County’s Mantua Elementary School, one of the most wired schools in the nation, teams of sixth-graders recently showed how far the traditional end-of-year presentation has come.
There was still some awkward reading, but the crude posterboard props had been replaced by a technological extravaganza: a 30-inch television monitor, closed-circuit cameras, recorded music, hand-held microphones and a three-by-four-foot computer screen with cascading Web sites.
"The children find this perfectly normal and natural," said Principal Jan-Marie Fernandez.
Experts say one key to creating a good school is acquiring a large number of computers and a good team of teachers who know how to use them. Educators across the country spent nearly $6 billion last year trying to do that, and the numbers show the results.
Nationally, there is slightly more than 1 computer for every 5 students. The ratio of students to an Internet-connected computer is almost as good – less than 8 to 1 – according to Market Data Retrieval, a Shelton, Conn., research company.
But leaders of technologically advanced schools such as Mantua say there is still much to do, particularly in training teachers to use computers for something more than teaching how to use computers.
A recent survey by the newspaper Education Week said only 29 percent of students had teachers who used computers to explain difficult concepts.
There are also annoying glitches and funding problems with computer use in schools, not to mention a makeshift quality that recalls early automobiles, with state-of-the-art engines under their hoods and curtains on their windows.
In the midst of their report on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for instance, Mantua sixth-graders Gwendolyn Yao, Erin Hopke, Mark Hou and Dylan Lahiff presented – along with a slide show and Web pages – a relic from the past: a diorama. Inside a cardboard box, clay bears walked atop a wooden-dowel pipeline. The students showed the diorama on the television monitor, but it was still a learning prop that dated to their grandparents’ school days.
Like the pioneers in nearly every new technology – bicycles, airplanes, radios – educational innovators say they are constantly tinkering and learning more from each other than from textbooks or manuals.
When Kristi Rennebohm Franz, of Sunnyside Elementary School in Pullman, Wash., created an award-winning curriculum – studying the environment of a small pond and sharing her students’ findings on the Internet – she had no experience in electronics or computers. Using the International Education and Resource Network, she and other teachers found ways to develop lessons in mathematics, reading, communication and the arts.
Educators have used software to help students understand complex concepts. "The computer is so valuable in spatial relationships – modeling of a molecule, for example . . . [or] to see what happens to the blue crab population in the Chesapeake Bay when you change various parameters, salinity, runoff, pH, etcetera," said Eileen Steinkraus, coordinator of the magnet program at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.
Janet Hudgens, the instructional technology coordinator for Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington, said she held her breath when a student teacher created a difficult math exercise for first-graders. She was exploring fraction problems, something usually reserved for older children. But the picture-making software worked.
"Using the technology helped them visualize the concept," Hudgens said.
Teachers acknowledge that technology will not fix every learning problem, and it is sometimes more cumbersome than old tools.
Eleonora Panto
Dario Zucchini