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Tools of Tomorrow Spur School Success Today

Type: Example from Schools Author(s): Kathleen Cushman Source: Performance. No. 23. Nov. 1995.

Pieere Van Cortland Middle School
3 Glen Place
Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520
(914) 271-2191

Gerrie Paige, Principal
260 students grades 6-8
35 staff
Suburban town north of NYC

From their first day at this middle school, students work on projects at computers and when they go on to high school, they take an electronic record of their learning with them.

Sixth graders introduce themselves with a splash in their first group project at Pierre van Cortlandt Middle School. Using a simple computer layout program each designs a "business card" describing the characteristics he or she brings to their advisory groups.

A few months later, these students are negotiating the electronic network of their middle school as easily as do professionals in a well-run company. At terminals throughout this classic Depression-era building, they log in their passwords and call up individual folders in which the work of their three years here accumulates day by day.

And when they move on to high school, they will take with them a multi-media final exhibition of their best work here - as individual as the faces, voices, music, art, and writing that each one's disk captures. Many graduates are so used to using technology as a learning tool that they come back to use PVC's well equipped labs when they carry out high school assignments.

The last place you might think to look for 21st-century schooling would be this sleepy Hudson River Valley town of Croton-on-Hudson, an hour north of New York City. The teacher's secretary, Barbara Zajac, remembers marching across the street as a second grader the day the school opened in 1940; her children went here too. But Essential School ideas combined with a substantial grant from IBM have caught up the entire district in a push toward active learning and authentic assessment that has won it a leadership role in the state and the nation.

Before long, the work of Croton students from kindergarten through high school will be followed and assessed via the digital portfolios of a pioneering Exhibitions Project run by the Coalition of Essential Schools and IBM. Benchmark examples available over the Internet will help schools around the state and the nation share their norms of excellence.

In the meantime, technology has dearly hooked kids here into the excitement of hands-on projects they might never have tried before.

More Interest, More Pride

"The computer makes it easier and more fun," says Morgan Lorenzen, who in sixth grade produced a newspaper describing his "research trip" into the Amazon in search of the double-crested basilisk. In the process he learned desktop publishing, research techniques using CD-ROM materials, and how to use clip art and an image scanner- as well as a great deal about the rain forest habitat. "I am glad to announce that I will go back to the Amazon again," the young professor declares in print.

"Using computers really helps students invest themselves in their work," says principal Gerrie Paige, "even students who have difficulty reading and writing. They can easily revise and rethink it, or add in new material. And it looks better, so they take more pride in it." After a piece of completed work has received its final grade, she observes, students often revisit and improve it. "It contributes to a culture of revision," Paige asserts.

Hand in hand with technology, this principal acknowledges, must come practice in the art of framing good questions, evaluating data, and making connections with a flood of newly accessible information. Eighth grader Naomi Feinberg, for example, brings out a computer-constructed pie chart describing her research into the relation between after-school activities and homework completion among her schoolmates. ("Kids who do activities actually do more homework than those who don't," she observes. "I think it's because their minds must be busier.")

"Computers can't do that kind of work for you," says science teacher Joan Quilty. "But they seem to make my students more interested in finding things out, analyzing them, and presenting them in a high-quality form." Her seventh-grade teaching team devised a "world tour" project in which students research a region and compare its geography, sociopolitical situation, and demographics to that of the United States via spreadsheet analyses and travel brochures.

David Fannon shows the Revolutionary War-era newspaper he wrote and produced in seventh grade using Pagemaker. "I really got interested in the British spy John Andre, partly because he was from this area," he says. "Reading biographies of him and of Benedict Arnold got me going on other military men, and I read a biography of Eisenhower and then one of Montgomery."

Other PVC students also say their reading has not suffered from increased computer work. "I like to read," says Brett Posmentier, 12. "I just finished Shiloh. " Another student, who has special needs in reading, eagerly mastered Pagemaker and then wrote and produced a manual for other students on how to use it.

Building on Skills

From the sixth-grade business cards onward, PVC's curriculum aims for an ever-widening circle of opportunity to use technology in the classroom. By second semester of eighth grade, they are ready to prepare a culminating exhibition, using Hyperstudio on the school's Macintosh computers, that makes use of everything from video recordings to writing, math, and original art. In the school's "unified arts" area, teacher Dean VanDeCarr coaches students who come and go freely to use the bank of high-tech equipment in presenting the best of their learning thus far.

"Next year we'll have a district-wide IBM-based assessment portfolio that keeps an ongoing academic record of every student's progress," says VanDeCarr. "The Hyperstudio portfolio is more a personal celebration." Over two months students collect, select, and reflect on their work with the help of Jan Felt and others on the eighth-grade team. By June, when visitors and parents press the mouse and click on a button, the faces and voices of these eighth graders will describe their activities and projects; show their essays, problems, and inventions; and demonstrate in digitized motion what they have done.

Some students don't stop at that. As eighth graders in 1994 Erin Towler, Sally Reynolds, and Sam Reisner created an interactive multimedia simulation of a murder mystery that was later published by Apple Computers. "To do it we had to know about the justice system, but we learned that in seventh grade," Sally says. 'The hard part was thinking all the parts of it through, working it out together, and then getting all the details to come out right."

Her teachers, some of whom appear in the game as suspects, nod sagely. They don't seem to mind that two years after leaving this school, its students still come back to revel in how much they learned, and how much fun they had doing it.

Student Work Comes Alive in Multi-Media Portfolios

The main screen of Pierre Van Cortlandt's Hyperstudio multimedia eighth-grade portfolio displays the name and photograph of the student, who introduces her work orally if one clicks the mouse on the "message" icon. One can also call up work-photographs, artwork, video clips, or written text, each accompanied by the student's explanation and reflection-in five categories: 'Aesthetics," "Problem Solving," "Communications," "Research," and "Beyond Class." There's no hiding behind a transcript's grades or numbers in this final report; instead, these portfolios offer a powerfully vivid look at the quality and style of actual student accomplishment. Some examples from 1995's graduating eighth-graders:

• In front of a concert audience during Black History Month, Jared Watkins reads "How Can People Be So Wrong?", his poem about the Dred Scott decision after the style of abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Elisa Golfinopoulos plays a difficult clarinet piece she has been working on all year, and displays pages from an illustrated children's book she revised several times ("despite my resistance") under the persistent coaching of her teachers.
• Casie Smith includes pictures and lab report text from a science project demonstrating her understanding of electricity,- a "grant proposal" she wrote after reading part of Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities; family photographs and a narrative in which she takes on the voice of her grandmother, a Scottish immigrant, and an oil painting in the style of Bob Ross that she painted in her own time.
• "Inclusion" students with various special needs meet the same high standards of thoughtful comprehensiveness. Technology has helped those handicapped by substantial physical or learning disabilities to present their work at its best, and even to surpass their peers sometimes in originality and resourcefulness,

This resource last updated: May 14, 2002

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