BY LAYLI WHYTE
Staff Writer
RED BANK — A partnership between the Red Bank and Keyport school districts has been created by way of a federal grant aimed at using new technologies — like Palm Pilots — to teach math to students
The Math Achievement To Realize Individual eXcellence (MATRIX) grant has been awarded to Keyport, lead agency in the grant, with the borough, a high-needs district, as a partner.
The grant was announced at a meeting held last week at the Red Bank Board of Education offices.
Red Bank Superintendent Dr. John Krewer explained that the purpose of the grant is to “enhance each school district’s current math curriculum through the infusion of technology using a hands-on approach to demonstrate real world applications of math.”
The grant will be paid over a three-year period and will total out at close to $400,000.
The grant is federal, although it was awarded by the state Department of Education. The total federal amount awarded was $8.2 million nationally.
Twenty-one districts have been awarded MATRIX grants across the state.
Terry Pilitzer, director of technology in the Keyport School District, and Jayne Frankenfield, technology coordinator for the Red Bank School District, have been meeting since the spring to discuss the grant, which was applied for in May.
“We were not sure what we wanted to do with the grant at first,” said Pilitzer, who approached the district with the idea of a partnership. “We just wanted to use technology to teach real-world applications in math. This will make the learning experience more valuable.”
The plan for the grant, which in the first year will deliver almost $125,000 to the schools, is to purchase hand-held (“palm”) computers for the entire seventh-grade class at each school, 145 compasses and a mobile cart for each school.
The equipment will be used for a Geocaching Project. Geocaching is a type of modern-day treasure hunt, in which students use Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and hand-held computers to locate the “treasure” by collecting waypoints, or coordinates.
“The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the Internet,” according to the project description.
The coordinates will be posted on the Internet, but will only be accessible to the students and teachers from each school, for security reasons, according to Frankenfield.
“The students will be learning very sophisticated skills,” said Dr. Elizabeth Keshish, assistant superintendent for the Red Bank School District. “But it is well within the range of seventh-graders.”
Sixth-grade teams will use the technology to locate on-site caches hidden by their teachers. The seventh-graders will travel via student researched bus routes to their partnering schools, collecting designated waypoints with the GPS receivers, and recording the time and distance to the partner school.
The students will then locate the geocaches at the partner school, using the appropriate technologies and record the activity with their palm computers’ Excel and digital camera functions. The students will share their lunch and geocaching experiences, then return to their respective schools.
The seventh-graders will compile the data in Excel spreadsheets and organize the information within PowerPoint presentation. That presentation will then be shared with the partner school during a videoconference.
“This is the kind of thing that can determine people’s careers,” observed Keshish.
In addition to the skills that students learn concerning the hardware, software will help students organize and manipulate data by creating formulas, charts and graphs.
“This is not a frill,” said Frankenfield. “These are skills that these students will need once they are in the workplace.”
The curriculum is fully aligned with the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards and is expected to be in place in the schools by January. Twenty-five percent of the grant must be allocated to staff development and on Saturday, the sixth- and seventh-grade math teachers from both schools will have a chance to test the technology before teaching it to students.
The annual grant total of more than $124,000 will provide each seventh-grader with their own palm computer, and they will act as mentors to the sixth-grade students, teaching them the technology for next year.
Next year, with the added grant money of more than $130,000, the districts plan to add eighth-graders to the program, since they will have already been trained for the technology from the previous year.
This year, seventh-graders will have the opportunity to bring the palm computers home and to use them as their personal organizers, said Frankenfield.
The final year of the grant will bring the districts an additional $140,000 and, Krewer said, the schools hope they will have enough equipment to keep this program going beyond the initial three-year period.