October 13, 2004

SMART students track storms

Eastern Elementary students use interactive technology to follow hurricanes in real time

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer

       Sixth-grade students in Jim Linsell's class are closely watching Nicole this week.
      Not an Eastern Elementary School classmate, Nicole is a tropical storm swirling in the Atlantic Ocean with the potential of becoming noteworthy during this year's high-intensity hurricane season.
      During their ongoing hurricane unit, students are thinking like meteorologists as they track tropical storms as they form, predict their paths and then monitor the storms' actual movements. Along the way, they are learning about map reading, coordinates, latitude and longitude, weather patterns, hurricane conditions, time zones, Greenwich Mean Time - the list goes on and on.
      "We drew our maps out and look at where the hurricane is on the white board and then plot it," said Ashley Aldredge, a student in the class. "I've learned latitude and longitude coordinates and how to work them and the geography of the area [the Caribbean]."
      The students use a SMART Board interactive white board to track the hurricanes and tropical storms real time. This technology turns a white board into a touch screen for a computer allowing the class to view and use the same information simultaneously.
      The students have been linking to weather and hurricane sites to follow the progress of every hurricane since the school year started.
      "I thought it was interesting how Jeanne did a loop, that is unusual," Aldredge noted. "We tracked Karl but Lisa never came into the coordinates we watch."
      Monday afternoon, the students were pooling their knowledge about hurricanes and predicting where Nicole would go next. One thought it would drop down and hit Cuba while another student thought it would head to the northwest toward Maine and Connecticut.
      They then pulled up the latest information from a weather site on the Internet and updated their prediction sheets. It turned out that both of the spoken predictions were false as Nicole headed northeast.
      The interactive white board allows students to write and erase information as well, with a character reader available to translate their work into a word processing file. Together the class created a "Thinking Like a Meteorologist" fact sheet, put the information into a flow chart format on the SMART Board and printed it out for future reference.
      Linsell received the SMART Board at the end of his Michigan Teacher of the Year for 2001-2002. Every state's Teacher of the Year that year took this technology back to his or her classroom.
      This is the third year Linsell has used it in the classroom and he said this high-tech generation easily absorbs information from the board. Another benefit is that students can learn and model computer skills for each other.
      "It is so visual and so interactive," Linsell said. "The SMART Board lets us do things that are very hard and lets us get past the barriers."
      "This information isn't some ditto that comes out of a book," he noted.
      Linsell is clear about keeping the bells and whistles of high technology in their place. He makes sure the technology is a tool that aids a lesson, not the central point. He also emphasizes to his students that the SMART Board - or any other high-tech tool - is not a toy.
      "Technology should not be used for its own sake," he said. "You need to have very clear instructional goals and don't let the technology be an end in itself. Use it to support your hardest learning concepts."
      Linsell also tapped his sixth-grade students from last year to give a presentation on technology in the classroom to a graduate education class he teachers. For this session, they met in his Eastern Elementary School classroom where his younger students gave PowerPoint presentations and demonstrated the interactive white board.
      "The graduate students were very impressed by them," Linsell recalled.
      Linsell noted that SMART Tech, the maker of the SMART Board, has a grant program available to teachers. For more information on this program, see the website www.smarttech.com or call Linsell at 933-1670.