Help from bank spurs upgrade
By JESSICA KELLER
ARGUS OBSERVER
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 10:56 AM PST
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| Student Tyler Wettstein (front), a third-grader in Aiken Elementary teacher Steve Wyborney’s class, aims a ‘clicker’ at the white board to answer a question during an exercise last week. |
ONTARIO — Aiken Elementary third-grade teacher Steve Wyborney said he thinks having a Classroom Performance System — or clickers — in his class makes his reach as a teacher go further.
The remote controlled answer system allows him to engage every student during every exercise.
“It’s sort of like calling on all the students at one time,” Wyborney said.
Now, two more classrooms in the district will gain the same reach as Wyborney’s.
Ontario School District Superintendent Linda Florence said the district was fortunate enough to receive a $6,000 donation from Intermountain Community Bank, which will be used to purchase a set of clickers for two classrooms — one at Aiken Elementary School and one at Alameda Elementary School.
The clickers are fairly spendy, amounting to about $3,000 a classroom, but Florence said it helps the school district with its goal to make sure students receive a 21st century education.
She said Alameda Elementary School set aside money in its budget to purchase clickers for almost every classroom, and that will bring the school one classroom closer to its goal. Florence said Aiken is also continuing to work in the same direction.
Florence said the school district was expecting a donation from Intermountain Community Bank but was not sure about the amount until last week.
“We saw the check and thought, ‘Wow, that’s going to be wonderful,’ ” she said. “We wanted to make sure the money was going to go toward something that was highly visible.”
Florence said the additional clickers will arrive fairly soon because the orders will be piggy-backed with those for the middle school, which is receiving technology upgrades — including clicker systems — for five classrooms from a technology grant.
While the new technology is fantastic, Florence said, one additional component to any upgrade is making sure it is used effectively.
“You get the clickers, but you have to make sure (the teachers) have the professional development so they can use the technology properly,” Florence said.
Once the teachers receive the professional development, the clickers can be extremely helpful in the classroom, Florence said.
She said, in the past, students may have had to wait 24 hours between completing an assignment and finding out how they did. In that period of time, if they did something wrong, that mistake may have just become ingrained.
Not so with clickers, which look like remote controls and allow students to answer remotely questions put up for them on a Mimeio computer screen. With clickers, students and teachers can learn immediately who answered a question correctly and who did not.
“That gives instant feedback to the teacher on whether students have learned material or not so they can re-teach it immediately,” Florence said. Wyborney said the computer keeps track of responses by quickly gathering the information on how students are doing. The answers to questions are then presented on the screen and students can compare the correct answer to their own. Beyond that, however, Wyborney can print out all the data gathered by the computer and find out the trends in the classroom — which students are having trouble on which questions or in which areas, which areas he may have to re-teach, which types of questions the students are answering.
“I think this would be an extremely powerful tool to have in every classroom,” he said.
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