MCPS experiments with tech tools

Great Seneca Creek is county’s first school to go all wireless

Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo David S. Spence⁄The Gazette Great Seneca Creek Elementary School’s fourth-grade teacher Tiffany Cupps wears a lapel microphone as she leads a reading lesson, which includes student use of a wireless tablet computer and response devices.

Think ‘‘Love Connection” or ‘‘America’s Funniest Home Videos,” except the voters are students entering answers to multiple-choice questions.

The scene is unusual for most county schools, but is commonplace at Great Seneca Creek Elementary, a new Germantown school that opened last month.

Great Seneca Creek is the county school system’s first ‘‘technology demonstration” school, meaning high-tech gadgets take a front-row seat. It is also the county’s first school to go completely wireless.

‘‘We know kids and we know where they are, and they are much further ahead of some of the technology than adults,” said Principal Gregory Edmundson. Using high-technology tools in elementary school prepares students to use more advanced tools in the future, he said.

Over the next three years, Great Seneca Creek will measure how this year’s kindergarten students perform academically with their technology-infused curriculum compared to this year’s incoming classes at other county schools who do not have the same technology, Edmundson said.

Teacher and student attendance and teacher efficacy will also be compared, he said.

Flat-screen computer monitors, portable tablet computers and lapel microphones are a routine part of the classroom at Great Seneca Creek.

Just three days into the new school year, students in Tiffany Cupps’ fourth-grade class were using their ‘‘response clickers” to vote for what it means to be a good reader.

Seventy-nine percent of the students said that a good reader chooses books at his ‘‘just right” reading level.

With the data that can be quickly gleaned, Cupps can immediately tell how the class as a whole performed on a math problem and whether individual students are having trouble with a concept.

Students were initially perplexed by the clickers, which resemble a calculator and have buttons with numbers, letters, ‘‘yes”, ‘‘no” and a question mark.

‘‘I didn’t even know what it was at first. I thought it was a remote control,” said Umesh Padia, 9.

Another advance at Great Seneca Creek is a new twist on the old chalkboard and more-current dry-erase boards.

Teachers and students use a stylus pen and write on a tablet computer that the teacher brings right to the student’s desk. Whatever a student enters on the screen is projected on the white board at the front of the room.

Cupps showed students a short video clip of Michael Jordan after reading the story ‘‘Salt in His Shoes” written by his mother and sister. In the clip, the basketball player talks about setting goals, which Cupps used to segue into a discussion about setting reading goals.

She displayed a passage from the book using a digital document camera and asked students what people need to reach their goals.

The tablet computer was presented to Umesh, and he circled the word ‘‘determination” in the text. The circle appeared on the white board.

Then Cupps put up a ‘‘word web.” Using the stylus she wrote, ‘‘What do great readers do?”

She then gave the tablet and stylus to several students who wrote their answers: good students read a lot, they ask questions, they make connections.

Classmates could see the answers, and Cupps can then print out copies for them to keep.

This makes Umesh’s life a lot easier.

‘‘Usually we have to write everything down and our brains get used for that,” he explained. ‘‘Now we have our whole brains to think.”

The new technology also makes it easier for students to communicate with their teachers. If a teacher is talking about a concept and a student doesn’t fully understand, the student doesn’t have to worry about raising his hand and feeling embarrassed. He can push a button on the response clicker and the teacher knows to explain the topic more clearly.

Students seem enthused by the high-tech presence.

‘‘The response cards help you because sometimes I don’t raise my hand and it tells you if you’re right or wrong,” said Andrew Azarsa, 9. ‘‘It’s cool.”

Equally impressed are parents, many of whom were not entirely happy with the boundary changes that shifted their children from Spark M. Matsunaga Elementary School to Great Seneca Creek.

But once classes were underway, many of those parents were happier.

‘‘It’s more integrated than anything they’ve ever done before,” said Tammi Ginsberg, who has children in second and fourth grades.

‘‘It’s unbelievable to see it in practice,” said Susan Burkinshaw, who has children in kindergarten and fourth grade. ‘‘Just unbelievable.”

The technology infusion is not the only advanced label Great Seneca Creek wears. The school, one of four new elementary schools in the county, is also the first registered LEED school in Maryland, which means it had to adhere to strict green building standards. Officials hope to receive LEED –– Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — certification in the spring.