Government Technology - November 2008 - (Page 22)

“ when students are engaged in the learning process and they can relate to the content and the teacher, they can do amazing things.” Shahram Amiri, CEO, Florida Institute for the Study of Digital Inclusion found that students who take the course have fewer behavior problems. School principals also support the program because the results are apparent to them. When they are in the class, student attendance levels are 100 percent at school, she said. They get fewer referrals and into fewer detentions. PHOTO COURTESY OF BREVARD PUBLIC SCHOOLS Adjusting to Students’ Needs PHOTO COURTESY OF FLAGLER COUNTY SCHOOLS Part of that has to do with the commitment required for the class. Students are required to attend every class and avoid suspensions and other disciplinary absences, or they are ineligible to take home a computer. Maggs said the completion rate for the course is nearly 100 percent. More than 500 students have attended the class and only one failed to graduate. In that situation, the student was removed from the class for stealing. According to Amiri, the program’s graduation rate is close to 94 percent. NOV_08 “That is a very good number, and it shows that when students are engaged in the learning process and they can relate to the content and the teacher, they can do amazing things,” Amiri said. Amiri said the institute conducted a study to compare academic performance of students who took the course against those who didn’t, and found that course attendees fared significantly better in subjects such as writing, reading and math than those who did not take the course. Grade point average was also greater in students who completed the program. “There is direct correlation between improved academic achievement and the graduation rate,” Amiri said, “both in terms of reading and math, and also communication abilities as well as the ability to critically analyze information. The students who went through this program do significantly better than the cohort who did not.” The institute’s study has yet to be published, but Amiri said writing score improvements were triple that of the control group, and reading and math score improvements were approximately double for students who graduated from the Make It-Take It program. “I believe that the children are learning how to learn,” he said. In Flagler County, Fla., the Make It-Take It course is taught to a wide variety of students. Because some of them have physical disabilities, several adjustments have been made to the curriculum. Former software engineer and program volunteer Bill Welch created gadgets to assist computer users who cannot easily maneuver a mouse. He’s also found a number of software programs that can help students who cannot use the standard interfaces. “The technology that I developed is very simple switches because using a mouse can be very difﬁcult if you have poor coordination in your hands,” Welch said. One such device is a mouse connected to a novelty Easy Button from Staples. Users drag the mouse to guide the cursor, but rather than using the buttons on the mouse to click, which requires ﬁne motor ability, they can lean on or pound the Easy Button, requiring far less precision. The gadgets, made entirely of donated devices, have let the county accommodate more students without increasing the budget. Welch also identiﬁed free software programs on the Internet to assist with things like speech difﬁculties and trouble using a standard keyboard. “After much trawling, I’ve found a variety of high-quality software,” Welch said. In particular, he cited a piece of software that uses a voice synthesizer to speak the sounds that the user cannot. By touching screen menus, users direct the computer to speak the sounds that he or she has programmed into the software. “These typically are very expensive pieces of software if you buy it commercially,” he said. 22 http://www.Govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - November 2008

Government Technology - November 2008 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for … Forward Thinkers Taking Tech Home Virtual Frontier Hidden Costs Uncovered Seeing Red For the Record In the Loop Benign Dictatorship Home-Field Advantage A Better Way to Park New Tools for Fighting Crime How It Works Spectrum Products Two Cents signal:noise

Government Technology - November 2008

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