Teaching technology

A group of parents in south Spokane County’s Liberty School District are determined that their small, rural district will have the technology that only larger school districts typically can afford.

The Liberty Junior Boosters were recently awarded a plaque that recognized their $90,000 in donations to Liberty Elementary/Junior High since 2001.

I don’t think we realized just how much it was,” said Junior Boosters president Jani Sievers. “That’s a pretty good feeling. We’ve had a pretty big impact.”

All Principal Lori Johnson has to do is look around to see the impact the small group of parents has had. There are document cameras in every K-8 classroom, 15 in all. Each room has a TV with a VCR/DVD player. There has also been plenty of small stuff over the years – pencil sharpeners, dictionaries, microscopes, calculators and even coats for needy students. One year the group paid to replace the aging, wooden playground equipment.

Such extras are beyond the reach of the district’s budget. “We would never be able to do that without them,” Johnson said. “We are way ahead of schools our size.”

The group has three annual fundraisers – a gift wrap sale in the fall, a spaghetti feed and a fun run every spring. Those efforts usually bring in about $10,000 a year. With the proceeds the group also hosts a book fair every year and brings in special groups and speakers for assemblies.

But the group’s biggest effort came in the 2006-’07 school year when it purchased document cameras for every room. The cameras make overhead projectors obsolete. Teachers can just place whatever they want displayed up on the screen underneath the camera, saving a lot of time and effort. It can be a page in a book, a picture or even an object.

It started when one teacher requested a document camera and the Junior Boosters bought it for him. “After he got his, it was an ‘aha’ moment for the other teachers,” Sievers said.

On a recent day science teacher Kipp Sims was using his document camera to illustrate how different wheel sizes take different distances to make one complete revolution. He turned his makeshift wheel under the camera and marked off distances as his students watched his progress. “He’s always got his (camera) on,” Johnson said.

Down the hall, second-grade teacher Aaron Fletcher used his document camera to project sentences up on the board. Students called out corrections in capitalization, spelling or punctuation while he wrote the changes on the board. “I love it,” Fletcher said. “It’s completely changed the way I teach. You can do so much more with it.”

The cameras can also be hooked up to computers, projecting what is on the computer screen up on the wall. “We can run computer programs on it. We can do things on the Internet.”

Once the boosters approve a request for any kind of equipment, the teachers research various products and decide which version they want. “The teachers need to choose that,” Sievers said. “We just basically write the check. We try and see who will give us the best deals.”

At this point, no large technology purchases are planned, but Sievers expects that to change. Two teachers just got Smartboards paid for by a grant. They are essentially giant computer screens mounted on the wall that function as touch screens and are fully interactive. Teachers can use them to play videos, create documents and use other multimedia. “I can see that being a future request,” she said.

Until that day, the Junior Boosters will continue to raise money to spend on technology to make student learning easier.

“Our kids have the cream of the crop right now,” Sievers said.