Eden Hall Upper Elementary teachers, like Joanna Sovek (top right), believe technology gives them a fun, relevant way to engage their students and meet critical curricular goals.
Sometimes when directors, writers, and actors are accepting an award, they’ll thank a teacher for lighting the fire that got them started.
So when you’re watching the Oscars or the Emmys in 10 years, listen for Joanna Sovek’s name.
The Eden Hall Upper Elementary language arts teacher is immersing her fifth graders in tools such as iMovie and Garageband while teaching them the arts of organizing thoughts, writing, and story telling.
And they can’t get enough.
In October, the assignment was to write scary stories and then record them as podcasts with Garageband-—using the application to change their voices and add sound effects such as creaking doors and footsteps. And every day during the project, they would ask Ms. Sovek, “‘Are we working on our spooky stories? Are we working on our spooky stories?’”
“What technology has done is spark their engagement,” she says. “It’s exciting to have that pulse in the classroom.”
Ms. Sovek’s students also are learning how to tell someone else’s story through her documentary film assignment. She and her colleague William Clack teach them to use a video camera, frame a shot, interview, and edit footage in iMovie. Again, it’s a “fun creative outlet that enhances the skills I’m looking for,” Ms. Sovek says. The tools get them interested—but the most important outcome is that they learn how to express their ideas effectively.
“Technology allows me to give a creative outlet to my students, while meeting my curricular expectations,” she says. “They don’t really know it’s happening because they’re having fun.”
Eden Hall teachers in general are among the most technology oriented in the Pine-Richland School District, say VARtek Classroom Technology Coaches. And many of them go beyond just surface-level use of the equipment and software.
Dana Lestitian teaches 6th grade language arts at Eden Hall. Her students have their own web pages, which she created using Weebly—a popular classroom web site building tool.
The students’ pages are packed with content that (with help from Ms. Lestitian and the CTCs) they have either uploaded or created online—such as writing samples, self-assessments, and comments about their work from classmates. Ms. Lestitian, too, can comment on each student’s page, as can parents.
Like many teachers who integrate technology into their lessons, Ms. Lestitian says she’s motivated to do so because technology is so relevant to students’ lives and it’s important to her that it plays a key role in their education. She says she also believes it puts students in charge of their learning, making it more real for them: “I like the idea of authentic learning—something that students take ownership of. … They create it; they facilitate it.”
In Kelly DeHart’s keyboarding and computer applications classes, it’s all technology all the time. Her fourth, fifth, and sixth graders come to her to learn mechanics that will make using technology in their other classes easier. In addition to learning to navigate the keyboard, they get experience using basic programs like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.
She’d like to help them learn to navigate popular social media sites, such as Pandora—an Internet-based music service. “But that would take a lot of monitoring,” she says.
So Ms. DeHart controls the Pandora stations she plays in class and uses lots of other teacher-oriented applications to enhance her work with the students. Among the apps she thinks other teachers would really benefit from using are Flubaroo, an online quiz and grading program; BouncyBalls, an app that uses the computer microphone to monitor classroom noise levels; and SuperTeacherTools, a one-stop site for several online educational apps.
Ms. DeHart and her colleagues at Eden Hall believe strongly in the power of technology to engage students and enhance their learning experience. She knows that technology is ultimately just a tool and that “a good teacher can deliver an objective using two rocks and a stick to teach,” she says. “But there is a WORLD of amazing things out there to further the discovery and excitement in your classroom.”