Schools

Salem Hills Students Present at Statewide Technology Conference

For weeks, the students have been working with iPods, iPads and other technology on a series of literacy projects.

Third-grader Mason Moland has written and published a digital book on John F. Kennedy.

Sound like a difficult feat for an elementary school student? Not for Moland and the other students of Lori Gustafson and Joe Melde, two third-grade teachers at Salem Hills Elementary School in Inver Grove Heights.

Melde and Gustafson's classes used iPods, iPads and other technology this fall to complete two literacy projects. Melde's students wrote and published digital books about people the students identified as heroes, while Gustafson's class recorded themselves reading stories to improve their own fluency.

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Their innovative use of technology to improve literacy won the pair—and a handful of their students—the opportunity to present at the statewide TIES 2011 Education Technology Conference on Monday in downtown Minneapolis.

“This is definitely a highlight, to see the kids in action and watch them working with principals and superintendents and teachers and sharing what they’ve learned," Gustafson said during the conference.

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Gustafson and Melde are at the forefront of the use of technology in classroom for School District 199. After attending another technology conference more than two years ago, the pair was inspired to bring iPods to their classroom to improve reading fluency, and took a proposal to District Superintendent Dr. Deirdre Wells. Wells backed the idea, and the teachers received a set of iPods.

“We found that, by doing the reading fluency project, the gains the students made compared to the students who weren’t doing the reading fluency project almost doubled," Gustafson said.

This fall, the teachers took literacy one step further by incorporating iPads into their lessons. For the students in Gustafson and Melde's classrooms this year, it was an opportunity to bolster their reading and speaking skills.

"I started reading better, and now I’m actually reading sixth-grade level books," said third-grader Patrick Donovan, a student in Gustafson's class who used iPods to record himself reading in order to improve his own skills.

"Over the last three years, we’ve been able to document kids reading fluency jumping up at rates we’ve never seen before," said Melde, who attributes the success, in part, to the enthusiasm that students have for working with technology.

"Everything that we do on there is so motivating," Melde said. "Something as simple as writing flash cards or doing a report now has that extra level of excitement."

But the students are also gaining familiarity with new technology—and bolstering those skills is growing increasingly important as digital technology continues to develop, Gustafson said.

"A lot of kids have grown up surrounded by it at home," Gustafson said. "It fits what they see outside of school."


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