Staffers embrace computers given to them
By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Hillsborough High School teacher Dawn Roslon will change the way she works this fall.
She’ll set up a class website and use it to share homework assignments and keep parents informed, among other things. Last year, she created something similar — but paid for the program herself.
As a biology teacher, she’s anxious to use the Webquest computer program and has set up links to “awesome” Internet sites she’ll use in her science lessons.
She plans to use Google Earth and its data, perhaps to compare before and after effects of deforestation, for example. And she could use Screencast to record her voice over images as she moves an arrow around the screen on a homework assignment.
There’ll also be a guide to the online textbook.
She’s an example of how Hillsborough schools will stride even further into the technology age in both organization and teaching. The district will use $1.8 million worth of computers it bought for more than 700 staff members as well as for more than 440 students in the growing list of pilot classes.
About 10 percent of pupils in grades five to 12 will be given a computer because they’ll participate in the district’s “One to One” program piloted last year. The percentage is planned to increase 100 percent in the 2014-15 school year.
All of Ms. Roslon’s classwork will be posted in “Google docs” where students can reach them and print them out at home. That’ll save her time at the copying machine and put responsibility on the students if they want a “hard copy.”
Ms. Roslon teaches college prep and inclusion classes and sees benefits for both groups. College prep kids can explore and share with each other to sate their imagination, and inclusion students can benefit from the additional assistance they’ll have at home, she said.
In the past, she might have spent classroom time lecturing or explaining the central point of a lesson. Now students can be assigned a recorded lecture or instructions for lab work after school or at home at night, leaving classroom time for review, exploration, discussion or other types of tasks traditionally thought of as “homework.”
District technology director Joel Handler calls it “flipping the classroom,” a revolutionary change in making education work at any time, at any place, from anywhere.
”We’re looking to change the educational model,” he said.
All of this is possible in Hillsborough because the district has provided more than 700 Lenovo IBM tablets computers to staffers.
The computers allow staffers to have a common device and programs for communication. The district has changed over entirely to a Google-based system. All employees will have a virtually unlimited Google account in which they don’t have to worry about deleting files to create room. Personal email will be stored in “the cloud,” not a school server, so staffers can access their files through any Internet browser anywhere in the world.
Everyone will be part of a network in which they not only can easily email one another, but can “chat” by words and videoconference from building to building. Everyone can use the same calendar function.
In addition to organization capabilities, the district has invested in training teachers in the possibilities of using the computer to reshape the way they present their subject. Trainers showed teachers how to use the programs, to sense what’s possible and explore and devise their own plan.
Ms. Roslon has bought in entirely.
”Initially, I thought ‘one more thing, another change,’” she said. “Now I can see the benefit, and I’m excited about it.”
Ms. Roslon took 10 of the 14 possible tech courses this summer, all voluntarily.
”Even if I do one thing from each course, I think my classroom will be better for it,” she said.
In fact, more than 50 percent of the district’s more than 700 teachers and staffers voluntarily took one or more classes this summer.
Even if they only took the Google-based courses, it will free them from having to be schooled in the in-service days before students arrive in school Tuesday. The reward for the summertime is teachers will be able to use that time to prepare their classrooms, something most teachers are anxious to tackle.
”It’s an exciting time to be a student and a teacher,” Superintendent Jorden Schiff said. “They have lots of opportunities they have never had before.”
He added, “We’re very excited about so much work done over this summer. There’s been a great deal of staff development.”
More than 530 teachers, secretaries, administrators and central office personnel also took summer tech classes; 505 took more than one class.
In addition to laying the technology groundwork, the district has revised almost every curriculum area except math and science, Dr. Schiff said. Monday, the Board of Education approved social studies and science textbooks, but Dr. Schiff said any hardcover textbook must have a high-quality online component.
Dr. Schiff said the district has identified three areas the world of computers can open.
One is to “globalize the curriculum” by drawing on literally a world of information available through the Internet and ways to “break down the walls of classroom” and make connections around the planet.
A second area is “asynschronous learning,” which means education can take place outside the hours and walls of a typical classroom.
The superintendent said he attended a computer pilot Algebra class at the high school this spring. He asked the students what was the best time they felt they learned algebra.
The teacher wrote alternatives on the board — in the morning, after lunch, early afternoon or the evening. Students took out their pads and recorded electronically their answers. Like a TV show poll, the results were flashed almost instantaneously in a graph on the white board in the front of the room.
The most responses: In the evening.
The third is “creation and collaboration.” Dr. Schiff said he wants kids to dream, design and collaborate on different projects and present it to large audience to appreciate.
The training room puts those three words even more simply. In block letters on the bulletin boards are the words “anytime, anyplace, anywhere.”