| Cyber Exchange Connie Campbell talks about Cyber Exchange, a project that demonstrates how technology can empower teachers. by Melissa Burgos Brown SCR*TEC I think the starting point is to change the way you look at teaching. I believe through technology, teachers take on more of a mentoring role than a directing role. You're mentoring the students by letting them become actively involved in their learning. That change is a little bit hard sometimes if you've been used to teaching one way.--Connie Campbell |
 onnie Campbell, a technology trainer for Jefferson County Schools in
Dandridge, Tennessee, has been working in the education field for over 25 years.
As technology trainer for the county, her job is to assist teachers in their
efforts to integrate technology into their curriculums. Her training efforts
include both teachers and students and a majority of her instructional materials
and projects are available online.
One of the many projects that she is currently involved in is called Cyber Exchange. This program is funded, in part, through a Goals 2000 grant. The program focuses on the language arts curriculum for grades 1-5. Professional development and successful classroom technology integration are the main focus of the project and both students and teachers are actively involved in the effort. Here, Connie talks about the success that the Cyber Exchange project has had integrating technology into the language arts curriculum and allowing elementary school students to take leadership roles in professional development efforts throughout the district. |
 Connie Campbell |
How did the Cyber Exchange project get started? When I was in the classroom, I trained my students to use the equipment and the software. They would keep journals and record step-by-step directions on how to do various tasks. As I talked to more teachers, I learned that they were really frustrated because they had a lot of equipment, but not a lot of training on how to use the equipment. I then realized that I had students who actually knew more about how to use the equipment than the teachers, because they had more time to work with it than the teachers did. To meet that need, I started letting some of my third graders help other teachers within our school. This led to the idea of creating a student mentoring program where students could travel and help other teachers within other schools. That experience helped us see that there was a great need in Jefferson County for staff development with technology, so I worked with our technology coordinator, Faye Humbard and we developed the Cyber Exchange project. It then evolved into a grant which is now being funded through Goals 2000. |
| Did you encounter any resistance from teachers with regard to student-to-teacher
mentoring? No, they have been very excited about it. We have run into a little problem with scheduling, trying to get the students released so that they can go down into another classroom, but that's been a very minor problem. Most of the teachers have been really enthusiastic about having someone come into their classroom and work with their kids. It's been a real positive thing for the teachers and for the students as well. In education, a lot of times when a child works with a child, you see more progress than when an adult is working with a child. So we've seen benefits in that area too. In order to train our students, one thing that we do is a summer camp for kids called ATTACK which stands for Add Technology to Acquire Creative Knowledge. We teach the students how to create Web pages and Power Point presentations based on a theme. Last year's theme was 'All about me.' All of our Cyber Ambassadors also made a Web page this summer. |
| "... we've seen veteran teachers
who wouldn't turn on a computer or touch a computer, that are starting
to get more interested in them. This change has happened as a result
of being in that lab everyday, watching their children get excited about
it and just learning alongside those kids." |
Professional development
is an integral part of the Cyber Exchange project, can you talk about
this and how it relates to the purpose of your project? One of the purposes of the project is to train teachers to use the technology, but we're also working on how it could be integrated into the reading curriculum for grades 1-5. We spent last summer training some students. We have students in each school that are trained and we call them Cyber Ambassadors. They go into the classrooms where they can work with teachers or with the students as the need arises. Then the teachers in each grade level come to the training center once a month and go through a day of training on a specific piece of software or a specific use of technology. It's always very exciting see that the teachers are very eager to learn new ways to use technology! The morning session focuses on how to use the software or equipment and the afternoon is spent learning how to integrate it when we go back into our classrooms. And since they're all teaching the same grade in that session, it's pretty easy for them to brainstorm and come up with some really great ideas. One of the projects we're doing in our county this year is called the Reading Launchpad. We have set up a lab and a lab facilitator in one school that focuses on reading. The children come to that lab with the classroom teacher and the classroom teacher actively participates in what's going on in that lab. It's been a wonderful and successful program. The interesting thing is, that we've seen veteran teachers who wouldn't turn on a computer or touch a computer, that are starting to get more interested in them. This change has happened as a result of being in that lab everyday, watching their children get excited about it and just learning alongside those kids. So that's exciting! |
| Cyber Exchange teachers also keep an electronic journal,
which we post at our Web site. I thought it would be useful for other
teachers to go to our site and read about these teachers' experiences.
In those journals, they share lesson plans or projects they're working
on. These are linked to the lesson plan so you can read the experience
shared in the journal and see the lesson plan which it refers to. We've
just tried to create a huge database of resources, not only for teachers
in our county, but for any educator who has access to the Internet.
Your Web site is very impressive, you mentioned some of the resources: the lesson plans, electronic journals, and there's also a lot of Internet projects listed that your teachers are involved in, can other teachers get involved in these projects? Those are all open projects on the Web that we've located. We spent one day training with each group letting them search the Web and find projects that they felt like they could integrate in their classroom. One of the projects that a lot of our teachers are participating in is the Class Pet Exchange and that's one that we've started locally. We have 234 teachers participating in that project this year from across the United States and several foreign countries. |
| "We try and encourage children
to use creativity. This project just encompasses so many language arts
skills. Not only will students develop creative writing enthusiasm and
improve grammatical mechanics, but also develop an appreciation for
a peer who lives in another area of the country or in another culture." |
What is the Classroom Pet
Exchange about? This project requires a classroom to adopt a class pet which is a stuffed animal. Then they get a journal to go with the stuffed animal. They are then paired with another class in another part of the country. They exchange their class pet with that other classroom and in return and the class pet stays with them for about six weeks. Each night, the pet goes home with a different child. Then when they come back to school the next day, they write a story about what happened. If they are not old enough to write a story, then they tell the teacher a story and hopefully she has a wide-screen TV that she can connect to a word processor so that the children can watch her type what happened when the pet visited them last night. We try and encourage children to use creativity. This project just encompasses so many language arts skills. Not only will students develop creative writing enthusiasm and improve grammatical mechanics, but also develop an appreciation for a peer who lives in another area of the country or in another culture. After the six-week period, the pet goes back to its original school. We started this project about two years ago and we've had teachers send us some ideas of things they have done. Some of the classes have had bon voyage parties or welcome home parties. We've had video visits where they video taped the school and the community and send it. We try to pair these classes up in very different communities so they are communicating with a peer that lives in a totally different situation than they live in. It has been very successful. We also send out a feedback form to teachers at the end of the year and most of them give us a response. We post those responses on our Web site too. So when you look at a project, you can look at the feedback and see what the teachers have said about it. This has been a wonderful opportunity for teachers to "get their feet wet" with an Internet project and after the experience most are hooked and are eager to try more. |
| Another project that you're involved in is "It's a small world...indeed!"
What is that project about and how can others get involved in it? That's another project that was started locally. I work with Peggy Moates, a fifth grade teacher at Talbott on this project. We work with electronic communication, e-mail, ICQ communication, and video conferencing. We have a large database of teachers from all over the world who are interested in communicating. We post a list of suggested topics for each month and they can connect with each other at this Web site and scheduling times for video conferencing, online chats, or just e-mail communication. We have teachers from Africa, Egypt, New Zealand, Italy, Brazil, and Singapore in addition to those in the United States, so there is a wide range of teachers participating in the project. How did you spread the word about this project to reach teachers internationally? What has really spread the word is our connection with Cybration, which developed the software that we use for video conferencing called ICUII. They set up an educators' server for us. One of the problems we've had is that when you use videoconferencing you can get into some very inappropriate situations in the classroom. The developer of this software has established an educator server that only registered educators may access. As you register for the software, Bernie Hoffman, who owns Cybration Inc., will direct you to our Web site where you may register for placement in the database. He established this educational server through his work with Peggy Moates, one of our fifth grade teachers. |
 Connie Campbell and Peggy Moates, co-director of Small World, work with students in the lab. |
Another interesting aspect
of your site is a student newspaper section for K-5 students. Can you
talk a little bit about that? We are encouraging every teacher who participates in the Cyber Exchange project to create a daily newspaper with their students. We've trained them on how to do this using word processing software and several of them have access to digital cameras. We put these newspapers online. A lot of our parents have access to the Internet so this is one way that they can go in and see what's going on during the day. Teachers were very skeptical about this at first because they have so much on their plate already, but they have gradually come around. Most of the them are very excited about it now and the parents look forward to it. A lot of the teachers print the newspapers and send these home on a daily basis. At the lower grade levels, it's more of a teacher directed activity. We've encouraged them to visit news sites and to look through the current events. Then we let them retell the story in their own words in the newspaper along with what's going on in the classroom. In the upper grades the teachers are just letting the children pretty much handle this whole project independently. So it's interesting to see their interpretations of the news. Not only are they reading about online current events, but they are also becoming actively involved. In one of our schools the fourth grade classes sold their newspapers to raise over $500 for victims of hurricane Mitch. |
| There are also various Power Point presentations at your site, are
those tutorials for teachers or students? The Power Point presentations posted at the Web site now are teacher-created and downloadable. Some of them are just instructional. The others on the Web site are each aimed at a specific reading objective. Once the teacher downloads these, they can even be personalized to their classroom if they have Power Point. They can just go in, do a little editing, throw in some of their student names, and they automatically have a presentation that is completely personalized to their kids. The presentations are interactive so a slide might ask a question and the student would click on an answer and get immediate feedback on whether their answer was correct or incorrect. So we're setting them up as interactive presentations and then we're also going to be developing storyboards to kind of get the children introduced to some books and authors. Later we will be adding presentations created by our Cyber Ambassadors. What are some of the upcoming plans for Cyber Exchange and how long is this project funded? Well this project is funded through the remainder of this year and next year we're working on an Empower project to build our Power Point database. We've actually gotten contacted from other teachers over the Internet who've said "I've created Power Point presentations, would you like to have some of mine to add to your database?" That's what we were hoping to do, create a database for the teachers so that they wouldn't have to sit down and try to recreate these presentations. We post a Tech Update online newsletter each month and in that newsletter we focus on a theme specific to that month. For example, this month our focus is on weather so we have a whole section of weather sites. What we're trying to do with Tech Update is do the Web surfing for the teachers. Teachers don't always have time to sit down and search. We also link our technology tutorials from the Tech Update. Everything we teach in our afterschool sessions, we have online in our tuturials. |
| "Now we're trying to use technology
in a productivity vein where they're creating presentations, they're
creating Web sites, they're creating documents. We've found that the
kids are much more involved in that method of learning. " |
Lastly, is there any advice you'd like to give to other schools that
are beginning to integrate technology into their curriculums? To the teachers I would say start slowly. The most discouragement I run into with teachers is when they just try to absorb it all at once. It's just something you just have to learn gradually and you have to include gradually. Don't feel like you have to go in there and just completely change everything. I think the starting point is to change the way you look at teaching. I believe through technology, teachers take on more of a mentoring role than a directing role. You're mentoring the students by letting them become actively involved in their learning. That change is a little bit hard sometimes if you've been used to teaching it one way. In our system when we first got started, we were using programs that were mainly just 'skill and drill.' At first that was pretty novel to the kids, but after a while they were burned out on those types of programs. Now we're trying to use technology in a productivity vein where they're creating presentations, they're creating Web sites, they're creating documents. We've found that the kids are much more involved in that method of learning. To school adminstrators I would recommend they provide ongoing staff development for technology and its integration. I think the most frustrating thing to teachers is getting the equipment and not knowing how to use it or if they do know how to use it, they don't know how to integrate it. We've been very fortunate to have support at an administrative level. As a small rural county, to have as much technology as we have, we have to give credit to our superintendent and our school board, because the state is no longer funding the 21st century program which allowed us to put teacher stations in the classroom. All of that funding now is coming to us locally and that has just been a wonderful asset to students and teachers in our county. |
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