Below are summaries of the schools I visited. All are private except James Logan High School. To view a school summary, you may either click on the name of the school above or scroll through the schools one by one; they are arranged alphabetically. To see a specific school's homepage, click on their name from the summary.
Branson School - Ross, CaliforniaBranson School has a well developed online Writing Center. The sidebar menu includes links to excellent literature and grammar sites. The online site features a student "Paper of the Month," a grammar challenge to which students email their answers, teacher and student comments regarding the lab, a "Writing Lesson of the Month," a write-up on the sentence, and an online version of their grammar handbook. It looks really helpful for students and offers a showcase for good student writing. An additional feature is that the site includes the schedule of who is booked to use the lab when so a teacher can see if there's space for him/her to bring a class.
Kate Moore, Chair of the English Department, uses email in an innovative way to carry on a larger discussion. She emails her students (as a list) a question about the literature, to which they must respond within a week; once all have responded, she asks for a response to the responses within the next week.
Branson's librarian has done an outstanding job organizing online resources for the student. Check out the "Library" section of their website.
Castilleja School - Palo Alto, California
The History Department in particular uses technology at Castilleja. Students are doing reports and presentations on various topics using Power Point and Hyper Studio. The quality of the work is excellent as the students enjoy using the technology so much. Teachers all have and use computers themselves. Integration is in various degrees depending on the teacher and the course.
The Collegiate School - New York City, New York
At Collegiate, teachers like John Beall (now the new Headmaster at Hopkins) have spent hours putting together units centered on the Internet. He was involved with creating "Digital Dante," a comprehensive site for the study of Dante. He puts together websites on content topics using his own slides combined with online references. Setting up sites like his is time-consuming but wonderful for the students who get to use them.
Crystal Springs Uplands School - Hillsborough, California
Teachers at Crystal Springs all have laptops, given to them free by the school. Technology is being integrated into classrooms in a variety of ways. They have one teacher's room set up such that computers line the walls of the room to facilitate frequent use during class time. Crystal Springs is still exploring ways to improve the integration of technology.
The Dalton School - New York City, New York
Dalton was given a large sum of money to develop technology for their school. In my brief meeting with Warren Johnson, Chair of the English Department, I understood that Dalton has created their own version of the Internet on their school intranet. Hence, sources won't disappear over time and the school is free from some of the constraints of copyright laws as everything is for use just within the school. Sounds wonderful for them. It is not available to others.
Harker School - San Jose, California
There are two campuses, the most recent of which is the High School. This is a new school; it is adding a grade per year (10th grade for '99-'00). In the heart of Silicon Valley, Harker School is geared to being at the top of the list of innovators. Dr. Bill Barnes, for one, is doing outstanding work with his 9th grade students using computers naturally and frequently within the class period. His students have desks, but sit upon chairs that can be rolled to the walls of the room which are lined with computers (one per student). He asks his students to do quick checks on their computers, for example about the meaning of a word or about what is going on during the time of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. Also for many of the works his students study, Dr. Barnes has put together an overview of what they will be studying along with numerous online resources (Tale of Two Cities example). He also has the student doing very sophisticated multimedia projects on The Odyssey. Assignment sheets by each teacher (including linked references to websites) are online even on the lower school campus! What lucky students!
Iolani School - Honolulu, Hawaii
At Iolani's upper school, all 8th and 9th graders are exposed to a basic computer literacy course. 9th graders put together Power Point presentations as part of a speech-oriented English year. After that, the use of technology in English varies widely, from just word processing to courses based entirely around publishing on the Internet (Illuminating Literature). Teachers like Paola Williams (History Dept.) put their course assignment sheets and other course information on the web. Other departments also, like Physics and Art, use technology in interesting and innovative ways as can be seen by exploring the Iolani website.
James Logan H.S. - San Mateo, California
Marilyn and Dave Forrest of Logan have really done amazing things with HyperCard Stacks. She teaches English; he, history. In the summers, they spend time putting together "stacks" for their curriculum. The one I saw was outstanding; it was centered on The Good Earth. The initial card offers two choices, History or English. If you select History you get to another card that offers a summary of each decade, each dynasty, various leaders, etc. At the end of whichever trail you decide to follow is an assignment. For the English side, Marilyn offers her students the choice of various characters. Each card on a trail pulls significant quotations from the book about that character. At the end of each trail is an assignment like, "Write a poem from O-Lan's point of view," or "Write a piece about how O-Lan handles pain." Students on these trails are focused specifically, seeing new things and learning. The number of trails a student follows depends on the amount of time available. The students work independently so the teachers can conference with smaller groups not using the computers. What a team Marilyn and Dave are!
Lick-Wilmerding H.S. - San Francisco, California
Lick has some pretty impressive things going on including that students post (online) their homework in a "Group Folder." The faculty's and students' schedules are online in a way such that everyone can find each other at any time, they can check the computer to see if a room is being used or not, they can see who a teacher's advisees are, etc. They (like Harker) use Inspirations for idea mapping. On a side note, the parent organization provides lunch for the faculty every Friday!
Menlo School - Menlo Park, California
Teachers are given laptops at Menlo for a $5 a month rental fee. If the teacher is still teaching at Menlo after three years, s/he owns the laptop. All their grades and comments are done online.
New Technology High School - Napa Valley, California
The school was created for juniors and seniors from schools in the area who wanted to try a high tech school. The ratio of students to computers is 1:1. English teachers comment on student papers right on the computer in the form of what looks like cartoon bubbles. They can place sentence error icons on the paper, which students can click for an explanation (i.e., what a sentence fragment is). As part of the Stanford Institute for Educational Leadership Through Technology, I experienced a virtual field trip there (video conferencing) and was able to ask questions of teachers and students.
Nightingale-Bamford School - New York City, New York
Nightingale-Bamford gave me a jump-start on my search for schools to visit in New York -- thank you to Dorothy Hutchinson, Head of School, for the leads! At Nightingale-Bamford, teachers like Judith Wolochow, Julie Whitaker, and Technology Coordinator Josh Feder use a good deal of technology. Among the innovative ideas I heard there were using the whiteboard as a screen to project from a computer so students could do things like grammar exercises and editing right on the board. Another idea was circle stories on computer, where each student starts a story on their computer, then gets up and moves to the next one and continues that person's story, and so on until each person has been around the whole lab. Then they read "their" story, and use that as a starting point from which to revise and finish a story. I also like the way Julie has her students be linguists, grammar detectives, ferreting out rules of things like commas and adding them to the class "Grammar Bible."
Suffield Academy - Suffield, Connecticut
At Suffield Academy, not only does each student have a laptop, but they have a special backpack with a padded slot for that laptop and a special locker by the cafeteria to hold their laptop during meals. Before initiating the laptop program, the school gave each faculty member a laptop to use for a year. The slow and casual learning about the technology resulted in the faculty spearheading the laptops-for-students movement. The faculty are offered grants in the summer to develop uses of technology for their classes. Suffield is the only school I saw that says it is in close contact with other English Departments in the area. Impressive.
Teacher Carie Waldron-Brown has been bold and innovative in her creation of the Suffield Writing Center. She trains students tutors to help other students with their writing; they get one credit for a semester of service to the Writing Center. My understanding is that students can go to the lab and find a writing tutor there any period of the day. She coaches her tutors regularly, and they report to her weekly on their work in the lab.
Town School - San Francisco, California
Town School for Boys impressed me for its integration of technology and Language Arts in the lower grades. In a fifth grade class, teacher Cate Brennan had emailed her students an assignment which included them drawing (using the computer) an authentic picture of Beowulf. To make it authentic they had to look up the clothing of the time on the Internet. The teacher had included in her instructions the URL of some relevant sites which the students could then easily copy and paste. They could also record appropriate sound bites to include on their pictures. They did the entire lesson independently; the teacher only stopped by the lab briefly to check on them, though the lab proctor was there the whole time to trouble shoot technical difficulties. Great preparation for the future! The students were to email their finished product to their teacher as an attachment and at the next class meeting present their pictures to their peers.
Town School also has a system that encourages students to write book reviews using HyperCard to add to their stacks in the library. There's one stack for each category like mystery, historical fiction, etc. (Technology and Learning, Jan.'94). Students can peruse the stacks to get peer recommendations for books.
Trevor Day School - New York City, New York
Trevor Day School has a laptop program; each student has a laptop. In Matt Wesley's Grade 9 English class, the students come in and immediately plug in. As they discuss Gulliver's Travels, students take notes on their laptops. If they had an LCD projector they could let students take turns modeling note-taking. The teacher could also show them how to review their notes, cutting and pasting notes to gather and synthesize information on the same issue, facilitating essay writing.
Marty, teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet to 10th graders, had students surf the web for interesting sites, writing up findings and emailing everyone in the entire 10th grade with hot sites. He wants them exploring widely on their own; he believes they can learn to discern the quality of a site by exploring and getting experience.
Bill Evans's 8th graders are Beta Testing Discourse Technology in which after the students plug in, the teacher's monitor will show what each student is writing. He starts class with a discussion question and immediately the students begin to write. Then he calls on one whose answer he uses to launch further discussion.
Teachers at Trevor have web pages with their assignments on them. They regularly post excellent student work on the school intranet.
For their faculty, Trevor Day School offers summer technology seminars ($50 stipend per day) on such topics as Front Page, Inspirations and Power Point. They also have a mandatory monthly (3:15-5pm) technology work session. Lastly, for faculty they have an ongoing chain of discussion on their intranet (the Discussion Web) which people can add to whenever they have something to say.
The Urban School - San Francisco, California
The Urban School is doing all sorts of innovative things, trying to integrate technology into every classroom. They get many visitors regarding their block scheduling and their well-developed community service program. More details are on their website and in their technology plan.
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