Souders second graders walking on clouds

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Dur­ing Mon­day evening’s Big Wal­nut Locals School Dis­trict Board of Edu­ca­tion meet­ing, Hylen Soud­ers Ele­men­tary School sec­ond grade teacher Mandy Bai­ley and Soud­ers Tech Tutor Milea Serap gave a pre­sen­ta­tion of not only what they’re doing in Bailey’s class­room but also what might be the future of ele­men­tary school edu­ca­tion as we move deeper into the dig­i­tal age.

Part­ner­ing with dis­trict Direc­tor of Tech­nol­ogy Wayne Thomp­son and Big Wal­nut High School teacher Ed Kitchen, who also does tech work for the dis­trict, Bai­ley has her stu­dents in a cloud — literally.

Kitchen and Thomp­son have both been work­ing to make Big Wal­nut a Google Cloud school dis­trict, and Bai­ley saw appli­ca­tions for her sec­ond grade class­room. With the assis­tance of Thomp­son and Kitchen, each stu­dent in Bailey’s class­room can now log on to the Big Wal­nut vir­tual server in the sky and access his or her own Google school account; and they can log on at school, at home, and from any­where they have Inter­net access.

Best of all, Bai­ley explained, as the stu­dents advance through inter­me­di­ate school, mid­dle school, and high school their per­sonal Google accounts stay with them. Stu­dents writ­ing sto­ries as class projects in Bailey’s class today will be able to access and revisit that work even when they reach adult­hood – a vir­tual scrap­book that will not yel­low and grow brit­tle with age.

Bai­ley said the secure accounts are on a vir­tual Big Wal­nut Google server, teach­ers can login into student’s accounts to make notes, cor­rect spelling, and even chat with stu­dents. There will be teacher’s accounts where they can share fold­ers with stu­dents and share fold­ers with other teach­ers; and par­ents will be able to log into the stu­dents accounts any time they want to track how their chil­dren are doing by using the student’s passwords.

Serap said stu­dents will also be able to col­lab­o­rate with each other and do peer edit­ing, and every­thing on the cloud is always up to date and in real time.

“Stu­dents can use PC or Mac, and its not just word pro­cess­ing,” Bai­ley said. “They can upload cur­rent doc­u­ments, there’s draw­ing pro­grams and spread­sheets. This takes away the flash drive that teach­ers are always wor­ry­ing that stu­dents would lose.”

Kitchen said he didn’t quite believe sec­ond graders were ready for this level of tech­nol­ogy when Bai­ley first men­tioned that she wanted her stu­dents to have Google Cloud accounts, but when he saw stu­dents with the tech­nol­ogy in their hands he became a believer.

Thomp­son said one of the pos­i­tive things about being a Google school is there is absolutely no cost to the school district.

“And there’s a whole learn­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive out there,” Thomp­son said. “Word pro­cess­ing, draw­ing pro­grams, spread­sheets — and the nice thing is, we’re all con­tained in our own cloud. It’s safe, it’s secure.”

Thomp­son said by Jan­u­ary all grade one through grade four stu­dents in the dis­trict could have secure Big Wal­nut ded­i­cated Google accounts that they keep until they grad­u­ate and beyond, and have access to those accounts any­time and any­where they have Inter­net capability.

“I hope in the com­ing years more grades will jump on this,” Bai­ley added. “Stu­dents at this age are becom­ing more tech savvy than most adults.”

Dis­trict super­in­ten­dent Steve Mazzi said becom­ing a Google School, using the cloud in the class­room, and plac­ing tech­nol­ogy in student’s hands is just another step for­ward as the state moves to online testing.

“This isn’t some­thing we just want to friv­o­lously do,” added board pres­i­dent Pam Lil­lie. “We’re being required by the state to inte­grate more tech­nol­ogy into the classroom.”

Posted by Gary Henery on Nov 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.