Tech raves - teachers discuss favorite high tech classroom equipment

Instructor, March, 2002 by Susan Mandel

Six teachers discuss their favorite pieces of classroom equipment-- high-tech teaching tools that captivate and motivate students.

DIGITAL CAMERA

Teacher Deirdre Kelly checked out the only digital camera at Lake Sybelia Elementary School, in Maitland, Florida, so often that school officials recently gave her one of her own--a Kodak DX3900. Kelly, who teaches gifted and talented students from kindergarten through fifth grade, uses the camera to take pictures of her students' work, to follow their progress, and then document it on a Web site.

The camera is also simple enough for her students to use. For example, when studying creativity this past November, students found samples of things at school that, in their viewpoints, displayed creativity, photographing them with the digital camera.

VISUAL PRESENTER

Unlike traditional overhead projectors, visual presenters can project a piece of paper or a page from a book onto a TV screen without its first having to be turned into a transparency. "If I do a mini-lesson on adjectives and I see that one student's done an exceptionally good job, I can share his or her work with the rest of the class," says Tammy Williams, a fourth-grade teacher at Greenbriar Elementary School, in Indianapolis, Indiana, where her ELMO visual presenter is hooked up to a 25-inch television set.

LCD OVERHEAD PROJECTOR

When teacher David Ashdown wants to show something on the Internet to his class at Cambridge Elementary School, in Cambridge, New York, he projects the Web page onto a big screen using an LCD overhead projector. "You're basically running a computer in front of the class on this gigantic screen," he says. "I don't have to worry about 25 kids saying, Mr. Ashdown, Mr. Ashdown, where do I click?"' to get to the right place.

Ashdown recently used the projector to show his class footage of the Leonid meteor shower from the CNN Web site. It also enables the whole class to watch one student solving a math problem on the computer.

VIDEOCONFERENCING EQUIPMENT

Fifth-grade students at Mantua Elementary School, in Fairfax, Virginia, are able to go on field trips without leaving the classroom, thanks to videoconferencing equipment. The school's Tandberg Educator 6000 "enables us to connect with experts, to take virtual field trips, and to conduct collaborative projects... ." says Sarah Skerker, a distance-learning coordinator.

Last spring, fifth and sixth graders in the gifted and talented class used the equipment to discuss black holes with an astrophysicist from NASA. Kindergartners and first and second graders got to see a live octopus at the Ocean Institute, in Dana Point, California. "I have little kids who have been the wiggliest in the classroom. But you sit them down and put them in front of a video conference, and they're hooked," Skerker says.

GATEWAY COMPUTER

Third-grade teacher Lori Marriott loves the two Gateway computers in her classroom at Hillandale Elementary School, in Durham, North Carolina. Kids will "do things on a computer that they won't do just with a pencii and paper," she says. "For instance, there are a lot of kids who are really having trouble with handwriting, but they can type." Marriott's students play math games, research with encyclopedias, and write stories on the computers. They also use them to make cards and stationery, and decorate their stories with clip art. "When you put kids that are struggling the very most on a computer, it somehow takes away the anxiety that they can't do it," she says.

IMAC COMPUTER

Kids love watching cartoons. So creating their own claymation videos is an especially fun way for them to learn. Second-grade teacher Amy Tucci at Vista View Elementary, in suburban Minneapolis, used her iMac computer and iMovie software to help students make one-minute movies based on Aesop's fables. They wrote storyboards and used a digital camcorder to film their claymation characters. The finished products were sent home on video to parents. "The kids loved it," says Tucci. "They wanted to do another one after that."

Susan Mandel is a freelance writer based in Arlington, Virginia. She has written for USA Today, USA Weekend magazine, and The National Law Journal.