Our Children Are Becoming Digital Citizens

Recently I was involved in a discussion about the ways children are learning now versus ten or twenty years ago. My sons have friends who are parents and several of them have iPads for their children. My younger son, Jon, told me that he was using his iPad at one of his friend’s home and their nine-month-old daughter crawled over to see what he was doing and to “help” him. She was used to using an iPad application aimed at pre-toddlers. The children in our preschool are only three and four-years-old and they have an innate ability to pick up one of the iPads and navigate to their area of academic application without direction from their teacher.

As part of our goal to integrate technology into the curriculum, many of our Columbia Middle School students are using Chromebooks. A couple of weeks ago, one of our fifth grade students showed me how she was putting together a website with six pages. She was building the website as part of an assignment for her social studies class. She had to design a website to compare and contrast the New England states back in the Colonial days with today. This task involved research, a lot of learning and integration of her technological skills with her recent acquisition of knowledge.

At the February Columbia School District Board of Education meeting, three sixth grade students from Columbia Middle School demonstrated how to use the Chromebooks and how to open a new document and immediately share the document with their fellow students. The students were proficient and said how much they enjoy using technology when working with their peers for editing of documents and creating group projects.

Last week the Columbia School District Curriculum Council updated the Technology Integration Vision Statement to read: Columbia School District will provide reliable access to 21st Century technology in order to meet the diverse needs of all students, empowering them to be productive and responsible contributors in an ever changing global digital society.

Our teachers are excited to help students embark on new ways of learning through technology. In addition to providing professional development to teachers to help them have the tools to empower their students to use technology effectively, the Bond Issue proposals will provide updated wiring, additional wireless access points, new technology switches, and new computers and tablets. As we work to keep Columbia School District students and teachers up to date with effective, reliable access to technology, we will continue to relate examples of how our students are benefiting from the integration of digital tools into the curriculum. If you have questions regarding Columbia Schools, please email me at pam.campbell@myeagles.org or call me at 5175926641.