ten billion butterfly sneezes

Tescott KS, population around 340. My dad’s hometown. The site of numerous visits to Grandpa Nelson’s house when I was a little guy. Population then, around 440 or so. A small town, off the beaten path, in Kansas. I’d thought that the local schools in Tescott had all been absorbed into the school systems of the relatively larger school systems in the area. Or maybe Tescott was the school district that survived, and other kids go there; I don’t know.

With that background mentioned, I was surprised to read this article about the Tescott Elementary School in the Salina (KS) Journal on-line edition.¹

The article examines how the Tescott school uses blogging in the elementary classroom, grades 3-7. It begins:

The talk of Tracy Piepho’s fifth-grade class Wednesday was the possible banning of dodgeball at recess.
But the kids weren’t talking about it; instead, they were writing about it, working in pairs and posting their arguments against the proposed ban (nobody wrote in favor).
This could have been done — after a fashion — with old-school paper and pencil, handed up to the front of the class and put in a basket on Piepho’s desk for later red-pencil markup.
But last year, Tescott Elementary School received a $150,000 federal grant for technology improvements. It was enough to buy an Apple laptop for every two students in third grade through seventh grade, plus wireless networking, digital cameras and other tools.
So instead, on Wednesday, the fifth-graders were posting their thoughts to a classroom blog, where they could see each other’s completed work almost instantly.
Educators from around Kansas visited the school Wednesday to see how the technology is being put to use.

That’s right, a blog. Other educators from around the state were there to learn as well. Learn what you need.

Tracy Piepho gets it; from later in the article, a student speaks:

And while she said Piepho requires the students to blog on a selected topic each day, “I just do this for fun, too.”
Piepho has found that many of his students have taken to the technology and not realized they were learning in the process.

Not realizing they were learning; the best learning of all. And, the quoted student does it for fun!

And, finally, from an educator who was there:

Sharing is what it’s all about, said Linda Loder, instructional technology coordinator for the Salina-based Smoky Hills Education Service Center, which works with teachers across north-central Kansas. .
.
“What you do is focus on the learning, not on the stuff,” she said. “If you focus on the learning, you find ways to use the technology.”

Technology as a tool, not an end. Teach what you know. Exactly.

-k-

Cross-posted to the Uplifter Weblog.
1 - The standard newspaper short-lived link may be applicable here, so I’ll probably quote more liberally from the article than perhaps I should.

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