June 2006 — Features
Print this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Teaching with Technology: The Secrets of Their Success
To weed out distractions, teachers will soon be using a piece of software to control instant messaging and Web site use. “We’ll say, ‘OK, today we’re going to the NASA Web site,’ and push it out to the class computers, and that’s the only site they can go to until a new site is pushed,” says Sepke.
Every single teacher who has gotten a tablet has had some lightbulb moment about what they could do with it in their classroom that they couldn’t do before.Jessica Sepke, Saint Mary’s School
When school officials decided to provide faculty with tablets, Sepke wasn’t sure how the teachers would react. Turns out, “every single teacher who has gotten a tablet has had some lightbulb moment about what they could do with it in their classroom that they couldn’t do before. Our dance teacher looked at it and said, ‘You know, my kids can do blocking and costume design on this, and we can hand it back and forth and walk through the ideas.’ Music teachers use them to handwrite individualized lessons for students in musical notation and to instantly e-mail the lessons as homework assignments. In biology, a teacher creates and distributes a precise molecular diagram to the class with an effortless click. And our coaches take them out onto the field. All of our teachers have had some amazing ‘Oh, look! I can do this! This is so cool!’ moment, and then they take them into the classroom and do it.”
SECRET #2: KMAC is a four-letter word for student achievement.
Katy Independent School District in Katy, TX, ranks in the 12 percent of US school districts designated “high-technology districts” by the CEO Forum. Part of the credit for the 47,000-student, suburban Houston district’s success goes to Scott Wright, who brought business-world knowhow to his role as the district’s director of technology operations.
But, for the district’s 2,913 teachers, the real secret weapon is a system known as KMAC: Katy Management of Automated Curriculum. Using the framework of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, which establishes curriculum standards for the entire state, Katy ISD teachers from elementary through high school work as teams within each content area to develop well-planned and standards-aligned curricula in which student learning objectives are precisely articulated and sequenced in six-week blocks to pace instruction.
Teachers access their learning objectives online through KMAC, which provides a database of instructional support for each of the objectives. Resources, assessment items, suggested strategies, and structures for classroom management facilitate lesson planning and delivery.
“When a new teacher comes on board, a big part of the orientation is learning the system and how to apply it, and really living the lesson-plan environment that’s been developed here at Katy,” Wright says. “Among the new teachers that come in, many have heard of the system and are anxious to get involved with it. We have activity all the time; it’s truly a 24-hour, seamless system. Home access and office access is exactly the same. It’s all Web-based, so we carry that functionality through.”
