K12 Schools Must Fill Need For Digital Media Skills
There is a new urgency to teach digital media literacy as a study finds students are taking online information for granted
A video-game type of environment will draw more students to become proficient in reading and math.
Video games are exciting and challenging to children, something curriculum director Donna Payne is counting on to motivate the students at her Pittsburgh school.
Payne’s program idea, the Living and Learning Arcade, at the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh Charter School captured a finalist position in the Second Annual DISTRICT ADMINISTRATION X-Factor Student Achievement Grant program. The Pittsburgh school won a year’s worth of AutoSkill’s Academy of READING and Academy of MATH software and training to help improve its academic achievement.
“My big thing for this is motivation,” says Payne. “And students today are motivated by video games.”
The school, which has 227 students in grades K5, made adequate yearly progress the past three years, but the goal is to increase the percentage of students scoring profi ient to at least 80 percent, Payne says. In 2007, 41 percent of fifth-graders were proficient or advanced in reading, and 90 percent of fifth-graders were profi cient or advanced in math.
“Reading is more of a challenge [compared to math],” she says. “I think this will help us reach high standards and raise reading scores. Everything is about testing, and we try to get our kids into magnet and private schools. Those scores mean so much.”
Payne explains that the charter school needs to spend more time just on literacybased activities. The school already offers weekly sessions of reading after school, serving roughly 12 students with volunteer teachers, and it’s just not enough.
The Program
The Living and Learning Arcade, an afterschool program, will take place in the gymnasium and will involve about 30 to 40 students in grades 3-5 who are in special education or Title I programs. Using computers on a mobile computer lab, students will use the Academy of READING and Academy of MATH programs three days a week.
Payne and technology director Clayton Powell are still devising details of the program, but Payne wants the gym converted into a “sort of arcade” and have a large cardboard “universe” or graph on one wall. In one scenario, students would electronically create their own avatars, or video-game characters, on a Web site, which would be projected onto the wall. The avatars would move up or down the wall, showing student progress in the software programs.
During each session, students will complete 45 minutes each of the reading and math programs. When students complete each program with 85 percent accuracy, they will then “challenge” a peer in a physical activity: a basketball game, jumping rope, hula-hoops, obstacle courses, and even Nintendo Wii fitness activities. “They need to let off some steam,” Payne says. “We’re not out to make it competitive, but I know that’s what happens.”
She adds that she wants parents, who must volunteer 30 hours per school year, to get involved in the program, for example, with setting up the game equipment or helping distribute snacks.
Mobile Computer Lab
Sulphur Bluff (Texas) Independent School District
Bringing Mobility
A mobile computer lab for practicing reading and math skills will help raise achievement for at-risk students.
In the small town of Sulphur Bluff, Texas, most residents head to nearby Sulphur Springs for work, as their own small town’s dairy farming industry has dried up over the past few decades.
The Sulphur Bluff Independent School District, which includes a single school building with one section for pre-K6 and another for grades 7-12, struggles financially and needs more technology, including a mobile computer lab, to especially help its at-risk and special education students and English Language Learners.
Kayla Ross, the district’s account secretary and grant coordinator, became one of two finalists in the Second Annual DISTRICT ADMINISTRATION X-Factor Student Achievement Grant program. Sulphur Bluff ISD, which has 242 students, won a year’s worth of AutoSkill Academy of READING and Academy of MATH software and professional development training to help improve its academic achievement.
