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Interactive Technology Will Infiltrate Florida Middle Schools

Middle school makeovers will include virtual reality, flexible furniture and collaborative spaces.

(TNS) — BRADENTON, Fla. — The human heart will come to life for in-depth study. A virtual tour of the Eiffel Tower is only a hop, skip and jump away. A quick look will tell you the temperature outside, graph it for you and show you trends.

It's all going to happen inside 12 inviting, renovated Manatee County middle-school classrooms next year.

The exciting endeavor could reshape how Manatee educators approach teaching, officials say, and how the district designs student spaces for years to come. The district will roll out the first 12 classrooms in the fall as part of the Innovative Spaces grant.

Each classroom will look and feel a little bit different, depending on what the teachers requested in their grant proposals. Some classrooms will be painted in more inviting colors. New desks and furniture are coming to better accommodate group work and collaboration among students.

"We wanted to give the teachers the ability to define it for themselves," said Patrick Fletcher, the district's chief information officer.

And then, of course, there's the latest and greatest technology.

At least one teacher will have a Promethean ActivWall installed. Erected along a wall, the giant projection board has 16 different touch points, and students can work directly on the board for a number of projects, all at the same time. Other Promethean products will flood the classrooms, including individual tablet-type boards that students can use flat on their desks while working in groups.

Virtual reality products from zSpace will also come into the innovative classrooms. Wearing a special set of glasses and wielding the pen, students can bring items — like a butterfly or the human heart — to life for more in-depth study.

Special lab discs will automatically record and plot measurements for different science projects, allowing teachers to move more quickly into the data analysis portion of the lesson. For example, the discs automatically measure temperature and humidity outside, and that reduces the chances for student errors. The data is then transmitted from the disc to a software program and plotted out for the student.

The classroom renovations are funded through a state grant.

Fletcher worked with Jeanne Nelson, the district's supervisor of instructional technology, to set up the project.

"As a classroom teacher, I have 57 minutes with those kids. For me to collect data and put it in some form to analyze it is going to take 10 class periods," Nelson said. "Collect it, dump it into the program and have instant analysis material. That's amazing."

Officials are hoping the "amazing" transformation will ultimately lead to better student achievement across the board and will point to best practices that can be replicated in other classrooms in years to come.

"The one most important thing is that as educational professionals, we're always evaluating our processes and the ways that we instruct students," said Ryan Saxe, the district's executive director of secondary schools. "We recognize our students learn today differently than they did several years ago. We have to be able to adapt our instructional practice to the needs of our learners. That's exactly what this grant does.

No one-to-one project

When it comes to technology and schools, districts have tried several methods, largely seen as failures, officials said. That includes putting a laptop or tablet in the hand of each and every student, commonly known as a one-to-one project. Those projects tend to be costly, and research has shown they have little impact, Fletcher said.

"We want collaboration," he said. "This is about more than technology."

This is the second year in a row the district has received grant money from the state for technology. In the first year, the district mainly focused on making sure each school had enough computers to complete the mandatory computer-based state testing. Every school is set now for testing computer labs, officials said, and that opened the door for a project like this.

"This wasn't a computer-based project, it wasn't a one-to-one. This is about setting up collaborative spaces, innovative spaces," Nelson said.

Nelson worked with some of her well-known vendors to set up "model classrooms" at King Middle, Haile Middle and Johnson Middle. Teachers who were interested in the project could head into those three classrooms to take a look at some of the different tools.

Then about 30 teachers who were interested filled out internal grant applications that were evaluated by a team of district officials. The three teachers with the model classrooms will keep their setups for the 2016-17 year after applying in the grant process, and nine more teachers have been chosen.

Nelson is in the process of ordering materials and technology now. Training sessions are planned over the summer for the teachers. Nelson didn't put a price tag on the applications for teachers, but originally estimated about $15,000 per classroom. With 12 classrooms, that's about $180,000 from the overall state grant. Nelson didn't have a final number because she is still ordering products.

Technology in schools needs to be implemented in a thoughtful manner, with a focus on how it affects learning and student achievement. The first rollout of this project next fall will be a learning experience for the district, Saxe said.

"For us, it'll be a pulse," he said. "It's telling us what works."

A culture change

Overall, the entire project will likely lead to a culture change. Both Fletcher and Nelson were surprised at how many grants included requests for different types of desks, chairs and classroom furniture. Gone are the days of desks in straight, neat rows. Most of the teachers want desks that are on wheels and can be moved easily around the classroom and into different configurations so students can work together.

Many others want different paint on the walls. And the grant-writing teachers cited research pushing for specific colors that help improve the environment.

"It's easy to focus on the technology when it's really a culture change or an environment change," Fletcher said.

Fletcher categorized the teachers taking part in the first-year of the initiative as risk-takers. Many of them are younger teachers who may be more in tune with some of the newest technology themselves. But that's not necessarily the case for all the teachers in the project. It's about the type of learning happening in the classroom, and that crosses technology and age barriers, Nelson said.

"We want student-led instruction, student-focused instruction versus a teacher up there talking," she said.

The goal is that the first set of teachers become "ambassadors" or "experts" in this technology and can become a point person in their school and in their subject area. The first set of teachers have agreed to have other teachers and outsiders come observe some of the lessons and how the technology is integrated. The visiting teachers can see something they'd like to use in their own classroom, Nelson said, and the project can spread that way instead of from a top-down method.

"We're trying to get our kids back to loving school," she said. "There's a lot of different ways out there, but not having the technologies in the classroom to do it is the hard part."

Meghin Delaney, education reporter, can be reached at 941-745-7081. Follow her on Twitter @MeghinDelaney.

©2016 The Bradenton Herald (Bradenton, Fla.), distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.