Technology & Learning November 2007 - (Page 32) the end of the lease. The laptop program, designed to have little burden on local taxpayers, was approved through a voter referendum. Promising Present Things were moving quickly at the school at this time. The school was named a Great Maine Schools Promising Futures High School in 2002 and was about to begin a shift to place-based learning, partnering with the national nonprofit organization, the Rural School and Community Trust. In 2004 the high school’s 25 teachers and 323 students were issued Apple iBook G4 laptops. Student use of the laptops has grown so rapidly that this year Mt. Abram opted to go with Apple MacBooks, for their increased memory and media resources, before the initial four-year lease was up on the iBooks. For this nearly 500-square-mile district in Western Maine, these changes have helped to level the playing field for a student population that is 50 percent to 55 percent Title I (eligible for free or reduced lunch). “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Tucker says. “We have parents who don’t have a phone line, let alone Internet access.” Some students near the Canadian border travel 60 miles to get to school. Once there, they all have access to the Internet and many other resources and, in many ways, are applying it to learning about the culture and community they live in. Place-based learning is applicable to differentiated learning, which is important in Mt. Abram’s heterogeneously grouped classes. Teachers are encouraged to seek nontraditional projects based in the community. 32 | www.techlearning.com PHOTO BY NICOLE SAVAGE, A STUDENT AT MT. ABRAM Technology integration takes top priority in a classroom at Mt. Abram High School. Many of these run across curricular lines. Technology Integration Specialist Darcy Pray works with teachers to make these goals become a reality. Some examples include a learning-venture partnering with Poland Spring Bottling, which taps into the aquifer 10 miles upstream from the school. Poland Spring has worked with teachers and students in freshman science and algebra to gather data using specialized probes, upload it to the laptops, and analyze the effect water extraction has had on the environment. Other co-curricular place-based projects include oral histories collected using iPods and Apple’s iMovie program by social studies and English classes. These are presented in the form of documentaries or Web sites and presented to the community at large. In another project, the applied technology and biology classes are working together to create a nonmotorized trail that documents flora and animal life. Throughout all these projects, along with other more traditional classroom activities, teachers look to integrate technology to transform education. In fact, the school has adopted a spectrum of technology use from the work of Bernajean Porter Consulting to assess the way technology is used in the classroom. There are three levels: Exploration (basic use such as word processing), Adaptation (using PowerPoint instead of a poster), and Transformational. This last stage involves “using e-mail to interact with students in another part of the country, going to a virtual museum, viewing primary documents in history class—things that wouldn’t happen without the technology,” Pray says. Working toward the transforma- http://www.techlearning.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.