Fort Smith schools issue take-home laptops

District’s digital efforts put students on ‘same playing field,’ principal says

Just before the second day of school started Tuesday, Ramsey Junior High Principal Dennis Siebenmorgen saw a lot of students sitting on benches with their new school-issued laptops open.

"It was interesting to see," he said. "Instead of talking about mall shopping, they were talking about computers and something related to education."

Ramsey is one of three Fort Smith schools piloting what school district officials have described as a "digital conversion," which includes issuing Dell Latitude laptops with touch screens that students may take home. Fort Smith enrolls about 14,300 students districtwide.

It's a transition other school districts are undertaking.

More than 900 laptops were issued Monday to all seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders attending Ramsey, Siebenmorgen said. Ramsey had a computer for every student to use at school in the past, but this is the first time for the campus to assign laptops to individual students. A little more than half of Ramsey students are from low-income families.

"It's put every student on the same playing field," he said. "They all have the same laptop and are capable of doing the same work every other student can do."

Teachers are experimenting with ideas for integrating digital tools with their lessons, he said.

With the laptops, teachers and their students have access to the same Internet-based programs in class. Over the summer, teachers received more than 15 hours of training on the digital conversion, including using an Internet-based learning management system called Moodle. The system allows teachers to develop pages where they can post assignments and extra resources.

Rules and music

On Tuesday, a day often spent going over classroom rules and procedures, an instant-messaging system within Moodle allowed one teacher to involve students in creating classroom rules, Siebenmorgen said. Rather than the teacher copying down rules, each student composed three rules. All students in the class could see the proposed rules everyone had written and could agree or disagree with them.

Ramsey choir director Keith Reeves looks forward to his students having access to an Internet-based music program that will allow students to record themselves singing to pieces of music. Reeves will use the recordings to grade students on their accuracy in pitch and rhythm, he said.

When singing a new piece of music, students are taught to keep singing even if they make mistakes, he said. It's easy for students to want to stop, but a component of the program will provide a visual cue for students to see where they should be in a piece of music they are sight-reading.

"The music doesn't stop for them," Reeves said. "They must continue to keep moving on."

Some families are not able to afford Internet service at home, so campus staff members are providing time for students to work on assignments before school, after school and during the day, Siebenmorgen said. In some cases, teachers will have to provide another way for students to access information for assignments at home.

Group learning

The Little Rock School District, which enrolls more than 23,600 students, is making a similar transition, said Barbara Williams, director of instructional technology. The transition began with fourth- and fifth-graders at four elementary schools receiving laptops last year and is continuing with 12 more schools this year.

Once the program is fully implemented, Williams anticipates schools operating in a mostly paperless environment, she said.

The Paris School District, with about 1,100 students in Logan County, issued Chromebooks to every high school student last school year. All middle school students received Chromebooks this school year, said Margaret Wilks, district director of federal programs and technology integration. The initiative will expand to the elementary school next year, with Chromebooks going to third- and fourth-graders, and electronic touch-screen tablets going to kindergartners, and first- and second-graders.

Paris school officials sought to provide computing devices to all students so they could learn through solving problems and working on projects, Wilks said. The computers allow students to conduct research online and to interact and share work electronically with other students in their groups.

"The kids are learning to do things together," Wilks said.

This year, teachers must complete training on integrating technology, and they must incorporate laptop use into their lessons at least once a week, she said.

Districts have to be prepared to manage broken computers, Wilks said. Paris charged an upfront fee of $25 as insurance against damage. She estimated that about 50 screens were broken last year.

At Ramsey, students have learned to access their grades on their laptops so they can keep up with their progress, Siebenmorgen said. Teachers are learning to teach in a digital environment, which requires more thought than simply transferring old lessons onto the computer, he said.

Within the next couple of weeks, teachers will spend some of their planning time each week discussing what they are learning and receiving guidance, Siebenmorgen said. The district hired a technology integration specialist to help teachers adapt to teaching with more technology.

"The ideal is as we create our lessons, let's look at how we can do this digitally," Siebenmorgen said.

NW News on 08/24/2014

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