The technology kids

For Christmas the students in Fran Harbour’s pre-kindergarten classroom at St. James Episcopal Day School sent their parents a holiday podcast.

They’re four years old.

In nearby classrooms second-graders produce PowerPoint presentations and have their own laptop computers.

And during a recent guest visit to one classroom, when the teacher encountered a glitch on her high-tech teaching equipment, second-

graders talked her through the problem from their seats until the program was back on track.

Forget glittered popsicle-stick ornaments. These future doctors, lawyers, teachers, CEOs—you name it—are as savvy with technology as they are with crayons.

In fact, technology is the driving force behind much of the instruction at St. James. While most classrooms across East Baton Rouge Parish are equipped with standard instructional tools like the antiquated overhead projector, notebook paper, pencils and markers, teachers at St. James use interactive whiteboards, laptop computers and wireless answering devices.

St. James’ classroom technology offers a tantalizing glimpse of the kind of advantage private school students are receiving in return for more than $6,000 in annual tuition. It also stands in stark contrast to what’s going on in local public schools. East Baton Rouge spends $8,521 per student each year, according to the state Department of Education.

“We wanted to bring our school into the 21st century,” says Linda Chauviere, head of school at St. James. “Teachers by nature are very creative and when presented with the right tools the sky’s the limit for learning.”

Before the 2006-07 school year St. James formed a partnership with Promethean, a British technology company revolutionizing the way educators engage, educate, assess and motivate students. The objective: to fully integrate classrooms with cutting-edge technology.

St. James spent about $300,000 on the technology. The initial funding came from an extensive capital campaign organized exclusively to pay for the technology implementation and is sustained through a yearly technology fee. And according to Chauviere, the school didn’t even have to convince its board of directors. In fact, its board came to them with the idea first.

“We looked at other schools, we read about what was available, did extensive research and decided on all of the pieces that would be a good match for us,” Chauviere says. “There is, to our knowledge, no other school in the parish that has all of the components that we do.”

St. James’ classrooms are equipped with a variety of tools from Promethean’s Activclassroom line, including “smart” boards, pens, wands and hand-held remotes students use to answer questions en masse.

Everything revolves around the smart boards, called Activboard.

“The Activboard is an interactive whiteboard used all day in a variety of ways to enhance and support the lessons being taught,” says Beth Dauthier, assistant head of school. “It’s not a means of taking away from the actual lesson, but it’s there to support what the teacher is doing. The students also use Activote, hand-held tools containing buttons marked A through F that correspond to information on the Activboard. The students use them to vote on everything from answer choices on classroom activities and tests to their daily lunch choice. The teachers use it depending on what works for them and only they can see the students’ input,” Dauthier says.

Second-grade teacher Nancy Lutz chuckles as she tells a story about her high school daughter going on a recent college visit. “The guide told the students he was very excited to show them the school’s science labs,” she recalls. “He wanted to show them this cool new thing that would allow them to interact with their professors, and he held up one of these (Activote device). My daughter raised her hand and said, ‘My mom uses those in her classroom, too,’ and he asked her which college her mother taught at.”

Students use technology throughout the school and all day. In Nessie Richards’ kindergarten classroom students sit with their legs crossed, taking turns with the Activwand, pointing to each word as they read aloud from a storybook projected onto the Activboard. In Emily Nikolaus’ second-grade classroom students review for a test using Activote remotes. And Alison Kaple’s students lounge on beanbag chairs engrossed in an educational video projected on the Activboard from an educational Web site.

St. James already sees dramatic results. Every student through the second grade is equipped with wireless laptops, using them for everything from typing short stories to constructing spelling sentences.

“They’re pretty cool,” second-grader Alex Gardiner says, demonstrating how the keyboard works. “Say I write a story or any random thing, I can save it under different files and then link it to my teacher’s computer to print it out.”

Parent Johnny Mann’s 12-year-old twins recently completed fifth grade at St. James and moved on to Episcopal High School’s middle school. Mann, who was on St. James’ board of directors when they decided to implement the technology plan, says his children continue to do well thanks in part to the technology they got to use at St. James.

“This is one of the finest systems around,” Mann says. “I know it’s the reason my children are successful. And in witnessing firsthand the transition to Episcopal, in most cases the St. James kids are doing better than students who came from other schools. If we put this system in a public school like Magnolia Woods or Bernard Terrace and looked at the resulting test scores I have no doubt the state would take notice. It works.”

Mann has decided to put his money where his mouth is, donating $30,000 of his own money to implement the same technology program in all fourth-grade classrooms at Magnolia Woods Elementary School. After Rev. Chris Andrews toured the classrooms at St. James, First United Methodist Church has also signed on, agreeing to fund the entire purchase of equipment for the third grade. And the Academic Distinction Fund will cover half of the fifth-grade classrooms. Mann is hoping to secure another $20,000 through fundraising efforts to fund the other half of the fifth-grade classrooms. “I’ve seen what this technology can do, and I’m willing to put up my own money to make sure other students can reap the same benefits,” Mann says. “If we don’t educate our children we’re going to end up incarcerating them.”

St. James has more technology-related plans. By the end of the current school year all teachers will be Intel-certified, meaning technology will be fully integrated into every aspect of learning at St. James. The school also is sending three teachers and a technology professional, including Kaple, to the 29th annual National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio this summer, where they have been selected to make a presentation on how they’ve integrated technology into classroom lessons, sharing their knowledge with some 18,000 educators, administrators and students from all over the world.

“It’s really amazing how our teachers have taken the technology and made it work for them,” Chauviere says. “Every teacher has their own teaching style and some of our teachers are relatively young. For them the technology is second-nature. Some of our other teachers have been teaching several decades and let’s just say it’s not so second-nature.”

Standardized test scores of the 267 students at St. James are further evidence the technology is working.

The school has been tracking its current group of third-graders, evaluating changes in test scores as the students have moved through the grades since implementation. The students have consistently scored in the 90th percentile on standardized tests, but Chauviere has seen test scores shoot to the upper 90s since the technology was introduced.

“The children have had more exposure to problem-solving, and that translates into critical thinking,” Chauviere says. “We feel very strongly that the higher scores are a direct result of the technology. It’s probably the wisest investment this school has made.”