Broward schools experiment with multimedia: SCHOOLS ARE EXPERIMENTING WITH MULTIMEDIA PROJECTS THAT EXPAND LEARNING WELL BEYOND TEXTBOOKS AND SIMPLE C

Byline: Hannah Sampson
Mar. 18--At one table in a Nob Hill Elementary fourth-grade classroom, students read about the cerebrum on a website their class has created.
Another student downloaded photos of the respiratory system and saved them on a laptop. Perched at his own station, 10-year-old Levar Smith helped a fellow student post comments on the class blog. "He's gonna post his thoughts or comments or questions," explained Levar, the blog manager. "He's gonna hit publish." Welcome to 21st-century learning, where Wikipedia competes with the encyclopedia and reports can just as easily be shown on an iPod as printed on paper. The computerized buzz of activity in the Nob Hill classroom was one example of an initiative that the Broward school district launched last school year to better prepare students for a technology-centered world.
The Global Learning Initiative through Digital Education for Students -- GLIDES for short -- lets students research real-world problems that interest them and create tech-heavy presentations for their subjects.
"And it's not about the FCAT. This is true learning," said Nob Hill Elementary teacher Sari Weltmann. The fourth-graders that she and teacher Michele Benson supervise at the Sunrise school are focusing on health and fitness. A healthy recipe book, commercials on fitness and videotaped demonstrations of preparing healthy snacks will likely be elements of the class's final presentation. A handful of schools took part in the initiative's pilot in 2005. By next school year, an additional two dozen or more will be participating, thanks in part to a $1.1 million grant from the Florida Department of Education.
Schools choose a broad topic -- like aviation, energy, music or cultural differences -- and students from different classes and grades team up to create projects that incorporate videos, podcasts, websites or other media. AVIATION CONNECTION At Miramar High School, which has an aviation magnet program, some students combined that subject and psychology for their projects earlier in the school year. Some projects explored racial profiling after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, while others looked at how aviation has influenced science fiction.
"What we were trying to get them to do was think about the subject we had put out there and use the technology that was available to them to create a multimedia presentation that was not just the facts -- but to bring creativity to it and to bring personal points of view to it," explained psychology teacher Deborah Harrell, whose five classes were among those that participated in the project. Jeanine Gendron, the Broward school district's director of instructional technology, said the projects not only prepare students for the future by forcing them to use technology, but they also teach them how to work in teams, manage a long-term project, analyze information and present it in an interesting way. Pompano Beach High School social studies and English teacher Jill Burdo said students get a taste of real-life stress that they might face in the workplace. "You end up working in a huge group and everything rides on this presentation and that's really the climate in the classroom," she said. Last semester, the school chose music as the topic, and students examined everything from business practices at Apple's iTunes to musicians' biographies and music's influence on politics. Sophomore Kristin Swanick, 15, worked on two projects at the same time, for her world history and international business classes. She researched iTunes for one class and, for the other, she dressed up in costumes from various eras to record video clips that showed fads in music over the years. Kristin said it was tough -- in her words, "a lot of work" -- but the payoff was worth it.
UNVEILING Parents, administrators and technology experts filled the school's auditorium for the final presentation, for which students were required to dress professionally. "They were very impressed with all the work that high schoolers actually did," Kristin said.
The experience, she said, has inspired her other work. "It makes me look deeper into a project and be more creative because I want things to stand out," she said.
Copyright (c) 2007, The Miami Herald
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my say:

Who thought in this day and age we would be saying bye bye to textbooks! The day has come sooner than later . Teachers are throwing out the textbooks and are using multimedia text books to teach there kids in the classroom. Many believe it is a wonderful idea, because textbooks can be so dull and boring. "What we were trying to get them to do was think about the subject we had put out there and use the technology that was available to them to create a multimedia presentation that was not just the facts -- but to bring creativity to it and to bring personal points of view to it," explained psychology teacher Deborah Harrell, whose five classes were among those that participated in the project.

In conclusion, I belive this is a big step not only in the broward school system, but all the school systems out there. By using the technology that is given to us, we are making strides to teach are kids in a better way then text books ever did. Even though this idea has just come up recently, I believe in a few years, this idea will be nationwide. Thats when we can wave bye bye to textbooks forever.