Jaime Lerner’s video just went up on the TED website. He’ll be speaking at Ecocity 2008 of course.
“Sing a Song of Sustainability” is only 15 minutes. Take a look:
Schools in the Twin Tiers
Chalkboards evolve again
Students eager to use interactive screens; many schools plan to buy more.
By Roger Neumann
On the wall behind the teacher, an old blackboard stretches from one side of the room to the other. To the teacher’s left, another large blackboard occupies most of that wall.Like unused home treadmills that have been turned into clothes racks, these reminders of school days past have found new uses, mostly as places to hang posters and pictures.
“Life has rules. Play fair,” reads one of those signs.One of life’s rules is that nothing stays the same. And so it is with boards in classrooms, which once were black and then green and were written on with chalk; then were white and slick and were used with colored markers; and now are also white but are operated by computers and penlike and wandlike styluses in the hands of teachers and students.
“It’s an absolutely amazing instrument,” Angela Cartwright, the teacher of this sixth-grade class at Odessa-Montour Middle/High School, said of the interactive board in her room.Cartwright has been using the new technology for about a year. Already, she and her fellow teachers wonder how they ever got along without it.
“It’s that dream thing you always imagined,” said Mary Knapp, another sixth-grade teacher at the school.Just what are these boards?
Think CNN on primary night. Maybe you’ve seen the political analyst who takes viewers through developments across the state in question, zooming in on a key district here, drawing colored lines across a swath of the landscape there, pulling up numbers and symbols to explain how the voting is going so far.That kind of technology is in our classrooms now, being used by teachers and students every day in a variety of ways.
A list of everything teachers and students can do with the new boards seems endless. But maybe what it all adds up to is this:“It makes it more fun,” said Tyler Goossen, 12, one of Cartwright’s students. “And since it’s more fun, it’s easier to pay attention.”
Instant feedback
During one recent lesson in that classroom, Cartwright displayed math problems on the board and had the students go up, one at a time, to work them out. As each student finished, he or she would turn the stylus over to another.Sometimes, as a problem was finished, the student would drag that page to a corner of the screen and dump it in the “garbage.”
As the boy or girl returned from the board, the other kids would call his or her name, or, “Me, me,” many of them squirming at the edge of their seats, waving their arms high above their heads.For some problems, Cartwright asked students to vote on an answer. They did so by pushing buttons on egg-shaped hand-held mouselike devices called Activotes by the manufacturer of the system, Promethean USA.
The board (an Activboard) kept track of how many students had voted, so the teacher would know when all were finished. And, when all votes were in, it tallied up the answers and showed the number and percentage that were right and wrong.When the returns showed a low score on a particular question, Cartwright said, “Uh-oh, looks like we need to be studying that one.”
When a score of 100 percent was displayed, teacher and students cheered and applauded.“The biggest point for me is using those Activotes and getting the immediate assessment that the students need, and I need as well, so that I can know if they’ve gotten the concept or I need to go back and re-teach,” Cartwright said.
Odessa-Montour has 16 Activboards and employs them for all subjects at all grade levels, using different software as necessary.The district is aiming for 75 of the boards, which would put one in each classroom, said Superintendent Jim Frame. He said the first 16 boards were purchased with state funds and grants.
Myron Rumsey, the district’s director of technology, said the rest will be purchased with state excel funding — the onetime extra state aid that districts received last year and which he said Odessa-Montour has not yet used. He estimated the cost at about $500,000.Rumsey said the project will go before voters in May.
Almost all aboard
Odessa-Montour is by no means the only school district using the interactive boards. Most districts and the Greater Southern Tier BOCES have the same system or something similar.But O-M was recognized by Promethean last year as a model district. Frame and Rumsey have spoken at the manufacturer’s international summit in London, England, and at national conventions last spring in Riverside, Calif., and earlier this month in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Frame said representatives of 30 to 40 school districts from around the state have visited O-M to see the boards in operation.The Horseheads district also was quick to jump on the new technology three years ago and to use the boards — the same ones Odessa-Montour has — in all grades except kindergarten at all its schools.
The district now has 67 Activboards and hopes to add more than 30 during the 2008-09 school year, said Gregg Moyer, technology coordinator.Elmira has eight of the boards from Promethean and hopes to add 150 over the next year, said Tom O’Hara, the district’s supervisor of technology. He said the expansion, at an estimated cost of $780,000, is part of the $100 million capital construction project approved by voters in 2006.
The Corning-Painted Post district has 30 to 35 similar boards, called SMART boards from SMART Technologies, said Joseph Reilly, director of technology. He said each school has at least one.No more excuses
Erin Shane, a social studies teacher at Horseheads High School, said she began working with the interactive boards right out of Elmira College, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 2006. The technology was beyond what she’d been taught in college, she said.
Shane said she considers herself computer savvy, but at first she had some difficulty with the new system. That wasn’t much of a problem, though.“My kids could figure out what was wrong in two seconds,” she said. “They could fix something or make things better. They really enjoy using it.”
By contrast, Knapp has been teaching at Odessa-Montour since 1970. But that doesn’t mean she’s any less savvy than Shane. Knapp said that when the first of the new boards arrived at the district, she couldn’t wait to get one for her class. Now that she has one, she loves working with it and finding new ways to teach with it.“It’s forced me to come up with different ways of presenting things,” she said. “But nothing’s in the way anymore. Now I have no excuses.”
sensiblecity
interactiv
ecocity
andrewfletcher