With an infrastructure to support technological changes in place, the Mahomet-Seymour School District is in the process of integrating technology into the K-12 curriculum.
The school district increased their bandwidth from 20-megs to 250-megs within the schools by tapping into the ICN Backbone network of dark fiber along I-74 last summer. This upgrade allowed for wireless connectivity at all schools.
With the capability to support systems, the school district has purchased laptops, ChromeBooks, iPads, Netbooks and Smartboards to be used within the classroom.
“The model is not having technology as a place to go in a school, not a lab you go to learn technology, but infusing technology in our daily walk,” Superintendent Rick Johnston said. “That’s where we are moving to.”
“For me, personally, as a former director of technology, I think about a kid walking across the stage at graduation,” he said. “That student should have experience with a touch screen, laptop, website skills, presentation and research skills. They should also understand what is appropriate on the Internet.”
The Mahomet-Seymour School District uses National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) to access what should be taught at each grade level as students move through the district.
“It’s an organized stair-stepped approach to developing those overall technology skills (the students) need by the time they hit the doors at the high school,” Johnston said.
Students at Middletown Early Childhood Center receive age-appropriate media training with an iPad twice a month as part of a pilot program to see what whole-class technology education looks like. Fifth grade teachers at Lincoln Trail have moved away from weekly computer and keyboard training for students into a project-based model.
While third through fifth grade students receive keyboarding instruction at Lincoln Trail, it is reinforced at the junior high level. By the time students get to Mahomet-Seymour High School, they are expected to have keyboarding, research and device-handling skills.
“How do we get there?” Johnston said. “That falls back into the NETS scope and sequence. We keep aligning with the national standard, applying it to what our kids need, and we tweak what they think we should be doing to fit our kids.”
Administrators and the Instructional Technology Committee have opened up the conversation on the stair-stepped curriculum while identifying how technology works best within the classroom.
“We did not want technology to be a top-down-driven initiative,” Johnston said. “Our goal for the Instructional Technology Committee is to be a grassroots initiative. They need to be the ones deciding where we are going within this district in terms of the vision for technology within our schools.”
With a technology gap between veteran teachers, teachers recently out of college and parents, district administrators realize the district is in a transitional period. The NETS standards have opened a conversation between all district levels on how to diminish the split in order to reach the learning styles of all students.
Johnston said while curriculum discussions have typically only happened within grade-level, the NETS standards, along with Core Curriculum standards, have forced the district to discuss the curriculum as a whole, which encourages discussions to happen between grade-levels.
Teachers who are familiar with integrating technology into aspects of their instruction have worked with veteran teachers to show them how technology can be used to engage students in the learning process. Veteran teachers have also been trained on how technology can make communication with other teachers, parents and students easier.
Lincoln Trail teachers, who have had smart boards in their classrooms for a few years, are training teachers at Sangamon on best practices as they receive their smart boards. Teachers at Sangamon are required to submit a plan on how the interactive smart boards will be infused into their instruction before the district commits to installing one in the classroom.
“We want to move away from (the concept of) we want the latest technology, so let’s put it in the school and hope we use it,” Johnston said. “It’s not a forcing it all on everybody; it’s helping people understand why you need to do it. It’s making (teacher’s) jobs easier and engaging students.”
Throughout the school year, teachers have been required to attend technology training and brainstorming sessions. District-wide Google accounts allow teachers and students to collaborate in real-time.
Johnston said the district may offer technology training or a guest speaker for parents in the future.
With district employee, student and guest access to the wireless system, the district put a filtering system into place which will monitor and knock down all inappropriate internet and email use. Copies of email conversations are backed up on district systems.
“Parents need to understand that we don’t want students bringing devices to school that have LTE,” Johnston said. “We don’t want kids walking in with those devices because they are not behind our firewall. Once they login to the internet service provided by the school, they are protected by the firewalls.”
Helping students understand internet safety is part of the overall curriculum. As the Instructional Technology Committee recommends devices to use at all grade-levels, they also take into consideration how the device fits into the internet safety curriculum.
“Internet safety at the middle grades is probably more of a concern,” Johnston said. “(Students) transition from a totally controlled environment at a very innocent age at Sangamon and Middletown into getting exposed to some internet safety (at Lincoln Trail). What does that need to look like? We still haven’t figured out what that looks like, but we have a lot of different devices there (to test).”
Johnston likes the possibility of using Chrome Books in the middle to upper grades, as it gives students the access to their Google accounts with the functionality of a laptop.
“It allows us to communicate with those kids in an environment that’s protected, using a device that’s very inexpensive,” Johnston said.
The district is currently investigating the feasibility of a 1-to-3 or a 1-to-4 model through grants and other initiatives. Devices will be available for classroom use during the day. It is possible that students will be able to check out these devices.
“When you say 1-to-1, people think every kid has their own device, and they are walking in and out with it,” Johnston said. “That’s not necessarily what we’re talking about. We want the people in the trenches helping to drive the conversation of where we need to go with this because they are the ones who know how it is going to be used.”
With filters in place, the district is able to control game use on all district devices.
“It’s important to demonstrate to kids why we don’t want to go (to games), and why they will want to go to other aspects of the functionality piece,” Johnston said. “They will only do that by using it. We’ve got to show them that there are all kinds of apps, and how they apply.”
Johnston envisions students being able to show their parents what they worked on during the school day instead of explaining what they read in a textbook.
While the Mahomet-Seymour School District wants to use technology to enhance learning for students, they do not want to go to a model where technology drives all aspects of education.
“We don’t want every single class in our district to be totally technology driven and look the same,” Johnston said. “We didn’t want that when everything was a lecture class like in 1950 where everyone sat at attention and regurgitated everything back on a test. Now with technology we don’t want them all to be the same, either.”
Johnston said one teacher may use technology to bring history to life through YouTube videos, old photos or films. Another teacher may use technology as a tool where students collaborate on projects through a presentation.
“When a kid walks across the stage to go to (college) they’re going to have different types of teachers,” Johnston said. “Or when they work, they will have different types of bosses. So we don’t want all the learning to look the same, either. The driver we do want is that the student is the one engaged in their own success. And technology helps that.”
