21st Century Learners
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Board of Education members Chris Drake, Bill Skaggs and Mark Fincham watch the screen as Linda Stelezer's students (from left) Abby Lloyd, Alesha Bergner, Nathan Kolm, Zach Shanline and Kale Wilson demonstrate a way they use electronic tablets in class. Aubrey Meyers is not pictured.
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Pratt schools describe themselves as being a 21st century, state of the art district. Liberty Middle School students showed the Board of Education what they can do with their iPad tablets at a meeting Monday night.
Book reports have gone digital — Linda Stelzer's sixth graders created short movies based on biographies they were assigned. Pictures and drawings illustrate what a word is and is not in vocabulary lessons. An app called Pages and Integrated Projects aids them in doing research and creating a research report that can include text and graphics.
"It's really cool," Alesha Bergner said, reporting on a social studies project on Mesopotamia assigned by teacher Sandy Foster that is also an assignment for Stelzer's language arts class.
A big advantage is that the project is paperless, Stelzer noted.
She and the students also demonstrated the use of Edmodo, a secure social network used by teachers and students. Students can access the site to pick up assignments when they were absent from school. They can take polls — a recent one asked students to respond whether a recent research assignment was clear or not clear.
Stelzer also noted that students pick up their agendas and start typing as soon as they come to class and when the bell rings, "I'm ready to instruct. It really engages the students."
