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| |  | | | | Good Things Come in Small Packages
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10.13.05
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Momentum. That's what the NASA Explorer Schools program is all about. Start with some seed money and encouragement, and watch the momentum grow. Students and teachers across the country are getting stirred up by the NASA-related subjects in the program. Sometimes, though, the momentum comes from areas you might not normally expect. Who'd have thought, for example, that attending a NES summer training session would lead to special funding for a school program using handheld computers?
Image to left: Students at Sandhills Schools have learned that handheld computers make their work easier and more fun. Credit: Tudith Dyer
Robin Salonich can tell you all about it. She's the technology coach for Sandhills Elementary, Intermediate and Middle Schools in Gaston Swansea, S.C. Salonich oversees teacher professional development in technology areas, guides them as they become more familiar with the resources in the school and on occasion, helps students with particular challenges. Sandhills Middle School is a NASA Explorer Schools campus.
The Sandhills schools are small and rural -- about 3,000 students in the district -- yet they have significant access to technology. That's the result of a lot of hard work submitting grant proposals, Salonich says. When local communities are short on resources, ingenuity helps fill in the gaps. Most classrooms have three computers, in addition to the schools' computer labs and the bank of equipment in the media centers.
The project to use handheld computers in the classroom is the latest and greatest idea to come from Salonich and the Sandhills educators. It was chosen as a 2005 winner by the South Carolina Association for Educational Technology (SCAET) competition. SCAET recognizes programs in the state that implement innovative uses of technology in education; the SCAET Technology Innovative Program Awards were established to honor the best practices by schools and districts in South Carolina. The winners were announced in September.
Salonich's idea was to give each of the educators a Palm ZIRE-72S handheld computer to keep for nine weeks. During that time, they'd receive tutorials on how to operate them and how to get the most benefit from using them. An essential element, though, was that the teachers were free to play around with the handhelds and immerse themselves in the technology.
"If you attend a workshop, you only learn the basics, and it's easy to forget what you learn because you don't practice it," Salonich said. "When you're free to take it home and play around to your heart's content, you really learn how they work. You become totally familiar with the handhelds, and that's when you're no longer intimidated by them."
Image to right: Students at Sandhills Schools in South Carolina use handheld computers as part of their daily work. Credit: Robin Salonich
Salonich showed educators how to download and use applications from the Internet. Teachers were able to create their own animations, charts and spreadsheets. The tools they created were then "synched" to their desktops -- and could be used on those computers, printed out or shown to the entire class on a projection screen.
After the nine-week orientation period, the teachers turned in the handhelds, which were then made available for checkout. Educators can continue to expand their expertise and knowledge of the handhelds and Salonich is available to help them learn more about creating lessons and finding activities for classroom use.
So how did the NES summer training session bring all this about? When Sandhills Middle School was named a NASA Explorer School in 2004, a group of faculty members went to a training session, where the educators were assigned handheld computers to use for a week. This opened the door to learning basic software applications, and encouraged them to pass on the excitement and knowledge they acquired, leading to the school's initial interest in Palms.
Quite familiar with networking to expand opportunities, these educators wasted no time in creating valuable relationships.
"We learned about partnerships and networking and using new technology to expand our teaching options," Salonich said. "We were encouraged to reach our highest potential and inspire the most students we could."
"It was through the NES weekly blast newsletter that I learned about an opportunity for five schools to partner with HI-CE -- the Highly Interactive Classrooms and Computing in Education,” Salonich said.
"HI-CE, which is based out of the University of Michigan, gave us access to a broad suite of software and one-on-one training with specific software experts. That's how we first became associated with handheld computers in the classroom and it all grew from there."
One of the major goals of the NES program is sustainability. Schools participate in NES for a three-year period, but NASA wants to make sure they continue to benefit from their participation long afterwards. Thanks to the initiative at Sandhills in obtaining the handheld computer funding, teachers there will be experiencing benefits from the NES program for years to come.
Related Resources:
Highly Interactive Classrooms and Computing in Education
+ View site
South Carolina Association for Educational Technology's awards for Fall 2005
+ View site
Maggie Griffin/NASA Educational Technology Services
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