Let’s time-travel back to the early days of the pandemic and consider its impact on many teachers: Panic and anxiety were aftershocks of an urgent pivot to tech-based learning, or “digitalization of schools,” a term coined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a 2022 report. The “Impacts of Digital Technologies on Education” report notes that in the pandemic’s aftermath, “many schools demonstrated a lack of experience and low digital capacity, which resulted in widening gaps, inequalities, and learning losses. Such results have engendered the need for schools to learn and build upon the experience to enhance their digital capacity.”
Ray Rhodes, the director of both community engagement and of the Chemours STEM Hub at EastSide Charter, a Wilmington pre-K to Grade 8 school, took the NIH’s suggestion literally—to the tune of a 40,000-square-foot, $26 million STEM facility, slated for a January 6 ribbon-cutting.
“Many of our students live in environments where they’re not encouraged to look at being an astronaut or scientist or architect. We want to stimulate that by providing these options,” Rhodes says. “When students enter this space, they will see a scientist at work, or a NASA astronaut. Now as a 6-year-old or a sixth grader, if you see that, you aspire to be that. STEM is the catalyst.”
The 6-year-old is an important data point, according to EastSide Charter CEO Aaron Bass, Ph.D. “If you walk into any kindergarten class and ask a kid what they want to be, you’ll hear doctor, lawyer, teacher,” he says. “You do the same thing at a high school where kids have been left behind, they will mention the service sector because that feels real for them.
“This means our bigger problem in education is we fail children because they don’t believe that the content we’ve taught them in calculus, biology, astronomy, and physics is applicable to them. We have to make sure that young people with incredible ideas of becoming an astronaut can become the astronaut, but you have to prepare spaces for them to engage with that idea.”
The Chemours STEM Hub, a first-of-its-kind in Delaware that will cater to EastSide Charter students during the school day but will remain open for public use after school hours, was born during pandemic, when Bass noticed that EastSide’s site was testing thousands while other locations were not drawing numbers close.
“It dawned on me that the community trusted us at a time when many folks weren’t trusting institutions,” he says. It sparked the question: What does the community need and how can we make an impact?
What Bass and his think tank decided on was access. STEM, Bass notes, is the No. 1 industry in Delaware. “But where’s the truly open access point to STEM? That’s what we are creating.”
The Hub will open the door to science, technology, engineering, and math education to students, as well as serve as a “boots on the ground” training lab for adults to join the STEM work force.
EastSide educators will work alongside STEM professionals. For example, via a partnership with NASA, in February, a NASA engineer will work with students to build and launch rockets, then, via tracking and measurement apps, the students will gather data about the rocket’s journey.
The Hub will partner with local innovators, too, like DETV, which will operate a TV studio in the Hub for students to get a hands-on education about how a TV show is shot, produced, and edited; Futures First Gaming, a tech, media, and esports-entertainment company that will offer students the opportunity to learn the science behind gaming; and Chemours, the Hub’s sponsor, will send its scientists to engage with students on the research, chemistry, and technology behind the critical solutions-provider.
Aside from laptops and smart boards, the Hub will also feature the equipment required to power gaming, coding, and robotics labs, a bioscience lab for hydroponics, and a “maker’s lab” with 3D printers, laser-cutters, and Cricut machines.
“Merging STEM with curriculum is important,” Bass notes. “Let’s consider gaming. We can now talk about how gaming impacts science and technology during the school day. This is not about playing games; this is about, ‘How do you program? How do you make this thing?’ For robotics, it’s not playing with robots; it’s, ‘How do we build them and write the programs that make them work?’ In biology, they’re learning about growing plants; let’s augment that by tapping into the next frontier with hydroponics in a lab setting.”
Rhodes makes clear the Hub is not just for EastSide. “This is something that will benefit the state,” he says. “We hope people come from everywhere. This is bigger than just us.”
Whereas EastSide has been building out, Sanford, a private school in Hockessin for preschool through Grade 12, has been building in. In 2016, Sanford opened a STEM lab with five 3D printers, in addition to the Geipel Center for the Performing Arts, home to the music and technology lab where dynamic educator Jeff Molush teaches music tech, a class he’s been evolving alongside technological advances for years. The class utilizes GarageBand, Apple’s proprietary creation studio, which Molush says is helping to shape today’s era of popular music. “Think about Billie Eilish—even she uses GarageBand samples,” he points out.
With GarageBand, students learn to edit, mix, create, and record. Projects include an “assembly” assignment, in which Molush takes chops of a pop song that students must piece back together. They also create genre-shifting background tracks to songs, such as mixing rap and country, and learn how to master sound production for a podcast. This culminates in a project in which they create their own sounds effects, voiceovers, and a soundtrack for a film, TV show, or video game.
“It’s pretty great. [They’ve redone] ‘Step Brothers,’ the psychological thriller, and ‘Teletubbies,’ the post-apocalyptic wasteland,” Molush says. “Often, kids don’t consider themselves [musical] at the outset because they don’t sing or play an instrument.” His classes change that. “It’s wonderful to witness,” he says.
Even if Molush’s students aren’t pursuing music degrees in college, they will be equipped with skills that apply to other industries. “This kind of technology puts more tools in the modern student’s toolbox,” he asserts.
Fellow Sanford tech educator Patrick Martin works with the lower school as the technology coordinator. Rudimentary coding starts at age 5. “We introduce coding concepts, like sequencing,” Martin says. “If they get it out of order, they have to learn how to debug it.”
Kindergartners use Code and Go Robot mice and eventually graduate to more advanced robotics, like Ozobots. Martin’s early learners also use an MIT open-source program called Scratch to learn how to program. Sanford is a 1-to-1 school that offers iPads to first graders and then Chromebooks from second grade on. During the iPad year, Martin teaches students how to take and edit photos, as well as create movies and music with iMovie and GarageBand. By the time they’re using Chromebooks, students use a webbased program to learn keyboarding.
Martin recently wrapped a project with third grade students who created their own bookbag tag utilizing a 3D printer. “I am always impressed by not only how much the kids gravitate toward these tools at this age but also how quickly they pick it up, and how each year it seems like they’re picking up this stuff at even younger ages,” he says. “Sometimes they teach me things.”
Other programmatic standouts include the fourth grade virtual reality design project; the Google Workspace practicum, in which students learn how to use Google Docs and Google Slides; and a crash course in good digital citizenship.
“Our approach is not just how to use the web and these tools, but also how to not abuse it, how to not bully on the internet, and having them understand that what you put out there is there forever,” Martin explains. “Those social aspects of technology are important, but so too is the practical use of this stuff. My daughter, who works in an industry that has nothing to do with tech, finds herself essentially coding. This stuff is everywhere.”
But tech in school extends beyond a 3D printer or a robotics lab. There are those less tangible products educators rely on to deliver compelling instruction in the digital age. This is where people like digital learning resource teachers Lauren Boulden and Carolyn Bush, both with Camden-Wyoming’s Caesar Rodney School District, come in.
“Our purpose is to help teachers blend and integrate technology perfectly into their lessons,” Boulden says. “It’s like the ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ model: not too much [tech], not too little, but just right.”
Bush and Boulden work on a suite of EdTech products, like EdPuzzle, which integrates videos into lessons and embeds lines of inquiry within. “The old-fashioned way would be to start a video, pause it to ask some questions, answer one of the students who raises their hand, and then begin the video again,” Boulden says. “In this case, the tech embeds the question, and every student can answer immediately via their Chromebook, and you can take the temperature of the entire room at once.”
The district also uses Schoology, an integrated learning management solution that provides course management, mobile learning, and support for system-wide communication.
“Schoology allows teachers to build their tests and automatically be graded if it’s a multiple choice or true, false,” Bush says. “If I’m a middle school teacher with 160 students, those questions are pre-graded for me. And that time is now back into me developing a really strong lesson plan or focusing on individually helping students.”
Classkick, an app and web-based tool, helps take classrooms paperless and allows educators to see and offer feedback in real time. “Classkick offers digital worksheets to which the kids can respond either via text or audio,” Boulden says.
Classkick also serves to close gaps in learning for those students who might need an educator to read with them, or if they have a text-to-speech goal. “This tool almost clones the teacher,” Bush says. “The educator doesn’t have to pull a student aside and read the assignment; instead, they can read the directions, record the audio, and the student can play it again and again.”
Online assessment tool i-Ready, a content-specific program that provides individualized assessment, also serves to close those gaps. “Students get a diagnostic, and the program decides where each student is and builds from there,” says Bush, “although it’s important to stress that i-Ready is not used as a replacement for curriculum; it provides support in the gaps while they’re learning curriculum.”
While the two make it their life’s work to help educators integrate technology in their classrooms, they’re cognizant of “the blend.” “You can’t have all or nothing,” Boulden says. “Yes, we are living in a digital world, but this is a world that still has tangible things. Being able to understand how to use the tech is just as important as using the pencil and paper.”
There are also those things EdTech tools can never do, which is replicate the personality, humor, thoughtfulness, and attention of a teacher. “Our teachers are so motivating and inspiring,” Bush says. “I would hate to land in a place where kids just look at computers all day. It would be a huge disservice to the humans at the heart of these classrooms.”
Speaking of those humans—are educators and EdTech tools besties again, after COVID really tested their relationship? “People really needed a pause on technology use after that,” Boulden says. “Some educators who had always felt confident, they stuck with it. But the people who weren’t, were like, ‘Let’s tuck all this away.’ But we’ve really gotten back to seeing the power behind these tools and how they support teaching. That’s not to say we still don’t receive hundreds of emails a day to put out fires.”
The district’s stance on using these tools is what they will provide in the long run. “Kids are digital natives,” Boulden says. “It’s almost like you come out of the womb with a device in your hand. However, they’re social digital natives. They know how to get around an iPad, YouTube. But how are you using technology to be productive members of society? That’s why starting in kindergarten, they’re learning how to use technology in a way that’s going to further their opportunities outside of the K to 12 space.”
“Ultimately, we want critical thinkers,” Bush points out. “When tech tools are here to stay, we pivot to use them to learn how to become better learners and thinkers.”
And then there’s AI. “The good kind,” says James White, Seaford School District’s instructional technology specialist. “AI is the unknown, and it’s what we’ve seen change most in terms of access for the adults in education, but also students. He focuses on how AI can adapt instruction. How it can individualize learning for students. “AI has emerged so quickly that we don’t truly know all the capabilities, but it certainly seems like endless opportunities for students and teachers,” White says.
While the 1-to-1 district hasn’t rolled out AI tools in classrooms, it is using other products to “individualize learning” for students, like DreamBox, K to Grade 8 math software, which does have some adaptive AI. “A program like DreamBox presents students with learning activities, and the program is assessing each click [on an answer] that the child makes,” White says. “It continuously adapts to the child’s learning, perhaps by dropping [the questions] down a level or setting a different standard. This is all about creating individual pathways, which we think are really important.”
Unlike some peer districts, Seaford has largely moved away from tech lab settings throughout its six schools, save for a digital media classroom at Seaford High for students who have chosen a digital media pathway. Students on the pathway can obtain their Adobe certification, practice their video production and editing, and more. Two years ago, the district also made another surprising move: getting rid of all the smartboards in their classrooms. “Smartboards were very popular, but we decided to move away because other technologies gave us the same functionality,” White says. “We decided to move to flat-panel standard TVs on our walls. Our teachers all have an iPad, so they’re now more mobile in the classroom, annotating and capturing student thinking with their device.” The choice to make the change aligns with the district’s tech stance, which is “to support the instruction, not just for the sake of having the tools.”
“Our hope is what we’re doing in our classrooms with these tools and programs is building the growth mindset in students to persevere and to understand that it’s OK to make mistakes,” White says. “Probably as important or perhaps more important for student learning is building that capability in students, and some of these adaptive programs do that: They meet them at their level, provide them opportunities to make a mistake, and then provide pathways to success when they do.”
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