Welcome to the Keystone School District's technology blog! Keystone is a small rural district located in northwestern Pennsylvania. Visit often to see what's new in instructional technology and how technology is being used at Keystone to help our students prepare for life in the 21st century.
Erin Zacherl's first graders and Vicky Campbell's kindergarten students enjoyed conversing with Santa during a "Cookies with Santa" videoconference offered by Magpi. Keystone Elementary connected virtually with several other schools and Santa, and a teacher from a school for the deaf even taught us all how to sign "Merry Christmas!"
Each school prepared cookies prior to the videoconference, showed them to Santa, and explained how they made them. Mrs. Zacherl's students made delicious concoctions of vanilla wafers, peanut butter, white chocolate, and chocolate chips to share with their kindergarten buddies. Yum!
Santa read "The Night before Christmas" and answered questions posed by students from each participating school. Our kiddos were truly captivated for the entire 45 minutes!
One of the many things I love about my Macbook is that I can clear all of my open windows and see my desktop by just pressing the F11 key. I don't have to minimize a bunch of screens to find something on my desktop! (I think the newer Macbooks require holding down the fn key and then pressing F11.)
I learned recently that PCs have a similar command. Holding down the Windows key next to the spacebar and pressing the letter m will also clear your screens and give you an unobstructed view of your desktop.
A recent blog post by Jim Gates really resonated with me. Jim is a retired tech integration specialist from an Eastern PA intermediate unit who now has his own consulting business. I've attended a couple of his workshops and read his blog and Twitter feeds religiously. This guy is very passionate about using technology in the classroom to promote student achievement!
However, he is now reflecting on the use of Web 2.0 and other tools simply for the "cool" factor. He realizes that we need to pull back and determine the educational value of these tools first. Do they help students work at the top levels of Bloom's Taxonomy? How do they help students meet the PA Academic Standards? The National Educational Technology Standards? As Jim puts it:
I suppose that this is a natural evolution of things. You first become enamored with a web app (cuz we're geeks, after all) and you have to get over that before you can focus on the learning. But, from now on, when I mention a "cool tool" I'm going to be certain to talk about which NETS-S it matches, and where its use falls on the new Bloom's scale. If the tools doesn't make students think in a different or deeper way, then I'll be certain to reevaluate before showing it to anyone. Where does a talking carrot fall on the new Bloom's scale?
It's easy to get caught up in the "That's so cool!" bells and whistles when we see a new web site or Web 2.0 tool. (Guilty as charged!) But as educators, we need to step back and ask ourselves how students will learn and grow and be challenged by using the technology. Where's the educational value?
Sony is giving away free laptops. A mother is pleading for help to find her runaway daughter. A child is collecting bottle tops to raise money for cancer research in honor of his ailing mother. A computer virus is circulating that will burn your hard drive. And so on and so on.
We all receive forwarded (and forwarded and forwarded) emails that we feel we must pass on to friends so they can get a free laptop, help find the missing daughter, add to the bottle top collection, prevent a hard drive meltdown, etc. But do you realize that many of these emails that we forward are actually just hoaxes that fill up our inboxes unnecessarily?
One of my favorite listservs, 180TechTips, gives tips on how you can check out these "urban legends" before forwarding them to others. The site I use most often to verify email stories is Snopes.com. Just do a search for the keywords in the email and see if the story is a hoax or fact. For example, I recently received an email stating that Sony is giving away free laptops to anyone who forwards the email to eight friends. (The email even said that the sender checked it out on Snopes!) Well, I checked it out on Snopes, too, and found the free laptop story to be a hoax.
So, before you forward your next urban legend, Snopes it!
We recently surveyed Keystone students in Grades 4-12 on their technology use both in and outside of school. We learned that:
93% have computers at home, and 85% of their home computers are connected to the Internet.
About 69% have high-speed Internet at home; about 6% still have a dial-up connection, and another 16% aren't sure how they connect to the Internet.
Almost 66% of high school and 34% of elementary students (Grades 4-6) have an account on MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking site.
Over 86% of KHS and almost 78% of KES students have an iPod or other brand of mp3 player, and about 80% of high school and 61% of elementary students have cell phones.
We also surveyed our students on their attitudes toward technology use in school and discovered that:
About 89% of students in Grades 4-12 feel that technology makes learning more interesting.
Around 83.5% think that technology makes it easier to learn new things.
About 78% said that technology helps improve the quality of their school work.
88% feel that having computers in the classroom is an advantage for learning.
In addition, it appears that our "Classrooms for the Future" and EETT grant programs have had an impact on teaching and learning at KHS over the past few years. A comparison of 2006 and 2009 survey data from Keystone High School shows:
Daily student technology use in classes increased by 12.8%.
Students who reported that they learn and remember best when the teacher lectures or tells them the information decreased by 26.7%, while the percentage of teachers using lecturing as a primary means of lesson delivery decreased by over 34% according to students. Only 8.7% of KHS students now report that they learn best when teachers lecture.
Students who said their teachers use technology to present lessons increased by nearly 33%, while an additional nearly 40% report that their teachers use a combination of methods to deliver lessons in 2009.
High school teachers increased their daily use of technology to deliver lessons by over 41% since 2006.
Unfortunately, Keystone Elementary has not benefitted from the state and federal technology grants that have targeted the high schools over the past few years. Teachers do not have access to nearly the number of multimedia projectors, interactive whiteboards, and student laptops that are now ubiquitous in the core subject area classrooms at KHS. This lack of equipment naturally limits the lesson delivery options at the elementary school. Although nearly 89% of students in Grades 4-6 say that technology makes learning more interesting, about 84% say that technology makes it easier to learn new things, and 88% report that having computers in the classroom is an advantage for learning:
Only 5.6% of KES students report that they use technology daily in their classes (as compared to 22.4% of KHS students.)
About 7.4% of KES students say that their teachers use technology to present lessons (KHS--49.6%), and only 6.5% of KES students report that their teachers use tech to present lessons daily as compared to 48% of KHS students.
Obviously, our challenge for the future is to find the financial means to provide the faculty and students at Keystone Elementary with the equipment and training they require to meet the needs of 21st Century learners while also, at a minimum, maintaining equipment and programs at KHS. And, of course, we can't forget that we need to continue to increase our PSSA scores as well!
This video demonstrates the unique instructional needs of today's students. Blog readers who receive updates by email may not be able to see the embedded video and should access it through this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8
There are now thousands of free or inexpensive apps (applications or programs) for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Educators across the country are finding that many of these apps have educational value and can be used by students in and out of the classroom.
Check out this list of educational apps compiled by a school district that apparently uses iPod Touches for instruction. And if you'd like to learn more about the Touch, just ask to see mine. I'd love to give you a demonstration!
Thanks to our Apple sales executive, Angela Miller, for sharing this site with us.
Keystone 7th graders made their annual trip to Beaver Ponds on a cool but sunny autumn day to complete a variety of cross-curricular activities. Using our Palm handheld computers and science probes, the students conducted a variety of water tests with Mr. Whitling. I heard someone say that the pond water was only 55 degrees! Mr. Everett assisted the students in taking and evaluating soil samples as well.
During another activity, the kids connected cameras to the Palms and photographed their favorite subjects at this wetlands and wildlife sanctuary. They then wrote descriptive paragraphs using strong adjectives and adverbs for Miss Wilcox's English class. Their reading class assignment for Mrs. McGiffin involved writing acrostic poems about their photos.
The students also went creek side to join Mrs. Werner and Mr. Reed to calculate water velocity for their math activity. Finally, the teens applied their geography latitude and longitude skills as they hooked the GPS devices to the Palms and went in search of items hidden ahead of time by Mr. Heath.
The handheld computers and peripherals were obtained through a "Hands-on Learning" grant in 2004. What great fun and what a great group of kids!
