Two elementary schools and one junior high school in Fort Smith will begin issuing computers this fall for students to take home.
The three campuses will pilot a concept that Fort Smith administrators plan to expand to the district’s other 23 campuses, said Barry Owen, assistant superintendent for instructional services. He anticipates that providing a device for each student to use at school and take home will allow for more personalized education.
“We realize that as a tool for learning, it’s not the wave of the future,” Owen said. “It’s presently happening. It’s part of our lives. We need to get away from teaching the way our parents and grandparents were taught.”
The move toward equipping students with computers is mushrooming in Arkansas.
In central Arkansas, the Little Rock School District has given laptops to fourth- and fifth-graders at four elementary schools - Otter Creek, Gibbs, Roberts and Forest Park. District officials envision rolling that program out to other schools in the city.
In addition, the Little Rock district’s new Forest Heights STEM Academy will provide tablets or laptops, depending on the child’s age, for all its kindergarten-through-eighth-grade children.
In northeast Arkansas, the Nettleton School District in Jonesboro will give sixth-through-eighth-graders laptops. The program might expand to ninth-graders.
Fort Smith administrators have talked about the idea for a little more than a year, Owen said. Principals in the fall studied a book written by Mark Edwards, a Mooresville, N.C., superintendent who has garnered national attention for a similar project his district began six years ago. Edwards last year was named the superintendent of the year by the American Association of School Administrators, a national organization of superintendents.
Edwards describes programs like the one planned in Fort Smith as “digital conversions” because they provide hardware, digital content and training for teachers to transform how students learn.
The Mooresville Graded School District, with an enrollment of 5,900 students, began its technology transformation gradually in December 2007 by giving all teachers a laptop, district spokesman Tanae McLean said. In August 2008, laptops went to all high school students and children in fourth through sixth grades. The program expanded to fourth-through-12thgrade students in August 2009. The district added third grade to the program in 2011.
The change coincided with higher graduation rates, from77 percent in 2007 to 93 percent in 2013, McLean said. The graduation rate for black students rose from 67 percent to 98 percent in the same time period, McLean said.
The graduation rate for low-income students rose from 71 percent to 91 percent and from 77.8 percent to 84.6 percent of Hispanic students, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
The devices made education more relevant and up-to-date for students, Edwards said.
“For our students, they used to go in and open up a textbook,” Edwards said. “They had a very limited amount of information. … They go out into the rest of their lives and are connected to all these information systems.”
Edwards thinks the primary purpose of education is to graduate productive citizens.Learning how to sift effectively through the information they find online is a life skill, he said.
“Whatever work venue or life venue, they’ll be using digital resources and information,” Edwards said.
Information for this article was contributed by Cynthia Howell of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 03/18/2014