By David Bitton, Appeal-Democrat
Gone are the days when a student could fall back on the excuse: “The dog ate my homework.”
Accessing schoolwork on “the cloud” has become common practice at Live Oak Middle School, where technology continues to be infused into everyday learning.
It is the second year the school of roughly 480 fifth- through eighth-graders has used Chromebook laptops in the classroom, and the first year they have accessed schoolwork on Google Drive’s cloud-based storage while teachers use Google Classroom to create, distribute and grade assignments.
“This is a way to motivate kids and infuse multimedia into the classroom,” said Principal Parm Virk. “We want students to have access to all the right information along with rich lessons in the classroom to promote it.”
The technology also allows teachers like Martin Svec, an English teacher, to interact with students in a different way.
As students are writing during class, Svec can monitor what is being written on any of the other laptops and can have real-time conversations with them through the medium while offering tips and suggests along the way.
Svec likes that flexibility and being able to interact with students quickly and easily.
Seventh-grader Rosie Lopez, 12, said she likes working off Google Drive because all of her schoolwork is in one place.
Seventh-grader Paloma Vazquez, 13, agreed and said, “The Chromebooks help us stay organized.”
Seventh-grader Adriana Pamatz, 13, likes using the laptop because it allows her to click on links and learn more about the topic being studied.
Svec had another reason for liking the technology now being used as schools around Live Oak Unified School District.
“I like that all the homework comes right to me,” Svec said. “I don’t have stacks of paper anymore.”
Virk, who has been leading the school the past eight years, said he thinks as much as 20 percent of his students don’t have access to a computer at home, making the keyboarding skills they are learning that much more valuable.
Testing on the new California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) system — which is done completely online — is coming up in the near future.
The school has four carts of Chromebooks totaling 144 laptops, and Virk said the school has saved money by buying Chromebooks instead of purchasing traditional laptops.
Having Chromebooks “gives them the tools necessary to be successful in a digital future,” Virk said.
©2015 the Appeal-Democrat (Marysville, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
