Pilot project puts iPods in grade school

VANCOUVER, Wash. – Third-graders at Martin Luther King Elementary School, heads down, ear buds deployed, thumb their iPod Touch devices to play games or surf the Internet.

“I’ve got so many aliens, I don’t know how many I have,” confides Adan Salinas, 8, racking up a high score on his game.

Hoo-boy. Today’s kids and their gadgets. What a classroom distraction, right?

Except Adan and his classmates are doing exactly what their teachers in the McLoughlin Heights school want.

Four third-grade MLK classes are part of a special iPods in the Classroom pilot program under way in Vancouver Public Schools this year, along with several dozen math students at Fort Vancouver High School.

The iPods allow students to repeat drills, dig up research material, and view short video lessons on hard-to-grasp concepts. All at their own speed, without disrupting others, freeing up teachers for more one-on-one attention.

The iPods also let students who don’t have a device or wireless Internet access at home master technology and learning styles they surely will use in the years ahead.

“It’s a totally different way” of classroom instruction, said Kara Beu, a King teacher who received special training this summer. “It’s not so much teacher-controlled, it’s children-controlled, which has been kind of nice.”

Next door to Beu’s MLK classroom, where her students drilled on basic math skills using several simple math games, colleague Jamie Donovan showed her class a friend’s postcard, mailed from Slovakia.

Where is Slovakia? On which continent? What’s its currency? Its population? Donovan asked students. They immediately began plumbing the Web, via a school-district-filtered WiFi link, to find answers.

The Vancouver school district used federal and state grant dollars to cover the approximate $10,500 per-classroom cost, which includes iPods checked out to students only during class hours and all necessary software and hardware.

Beu and Donovan say they’ve seen better class attention and attendance in the seven weeks they’ve given the iPods a try.

“There’s never a time anyone is not engaged. There’s no down time,” Donovan said.

At Fort Vancouver High School, iPods are old hat to many tech-savvy teens, though not all students.

In a few integrated math classes for freshman and sophomore students, they offer concise audio and video tutorial podcasts. The roughly 60-second lessons are either pulled from Web resources or personally produced by Fort Vancouver teacher Lorraine Berry.

Berry and fellow teacher John Conley use the podcasts to better explain and demonstrate such things as plotting a slope, algebra distributive properties or the Pythagorean theorem.

“It actually explains how to do things and gives examples,” said Darya Malkoch, 14, a freshman student with no prior iPod experience. She and a pair of classmates said the podcast recently helped them calculate slopes.