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Information and Communication Technologies
The resources below have been selected by Technology Department members.
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The world's largest Internet safety, help & education organization
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Building webpages and more
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Practice your keyboarding
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Copyright Information
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An internet safety resource for parents and educators.
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Are you cyber safe? Follow the link to find out!
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A free educational resource created by Carnegie Mellon University to empower you to secure your part of cyberspace.
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Click this link to visit our new media server, you can find links to videos, photographs, blogs, our school wiki and social network. You must know the username and password to access our media server.
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Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)
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Students are expected to sign our AUP before receiving their laptop.
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About Communications Technology at The School
The School’s infrastructure supports global learning and access to state-of-the-art applications and tools. We believe that technology should be readily accessible, transparent when not in use, and used in an appropriate manner. To enable this we has implemented a laptop-based computing approach. 1-1 in grades 2 through 8 and a 2-1 ratio in grades K -1 . The School does not teach formal computer classes, technology is integrated into the curriculum in all subject areas. Educational Technologists work collaboratively and team teach with content specialists to push technology appropriately into all subject areas. Examples of finished products can be seen by clicking here.
The Technology team at The School consists of the Director of Information and Communications Technology who oversees all aspects of the School’s academic, instructional and administrative school technologies. The technology team is made up of educational technologists responsible for technology integration into all areas of the curriculum, a media specialist who deals with the school academic and administrative media initiative, a systems administrator who oversees the school technology’s backend e.g. servers, a desktop support person who works on the front-end or helpdesk and a database/student information person.
All the department work collaboratively yet independently to operate a smooth running entity. The Director establishes, plans and administers the policies, strategies and goals for The School’s academic/instructional and administrative communications technology. He manages all aspects of The School’s daily communication technology requirements, and analyses hardware, software and audio-visual needs, and establishes priorities for feasibility studies, systems design and implementation to develop and/or modify The School’s information processing systems. Furthermore he manages the integration of technology in the classroom, along with the Educational technologists, and other technology staff, and helps to ensure the adequate support and faculty development and available for the academic team. He conducts ongoing evaluation of the effectiveness of the communication and digital technologies at The School, and also determine long-term system needs and hardware acquisitions to accomplish The School’s administrative and academic objectives and assess what emerging technologies that The School should absorb.
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Technology in Kindergarten will respect the physical, developmental and cognitive levels of our youngest learners at The School. In Kindergarten, students are exposed to technology in meaningful ways. Understanding that fine motor skills are still developing, computers are introduced as tools to support the growth that is taking place. Simple tasks, like moving the mouse and dragging and clicking, are practiced. The students draw simple shapes with the mouse and drag items to identify and create patterns. Bee-bot and Roamer, turtle robots designed for young learners, are introduced as a starting point for teaching programming.
In Grade 1, through integration, technology is defined as a transparent tool used for learning. Kinesthetic, visual and auditory learning styles are honored through the lessons created using the SMART Board. The students delve a little deeper into understanding how computers are organized and become familiar with simple ideas including turning the computer on and shutting down, opening and quitting applications and saving and accessing documents. The students use technology to express understandings of the family and connection in their classroom. Early programming concepts are explored to advance problem-solving skills.
In Grade 2, students learn organizational strategies to develop greater efficiency with the computer. Students utilize more applications to show understandings of the grade level concept and theme. Careful attention is paid to the curriculum to ensure that every learning opportunity is explored and integration will occur in many subjects. Digital cameras are used in conjunction with tools like GarageBand and Itunes to creatively communicate ideas to their peers and the school community. In partnership with the Science Department, Lego Robotics is introduced to promote creative and critical thinking. Collaboration, cooperation, self-expression is applied to complete the challenging robotic assignments.
Students in Grade 3 continue receiving formal instruction in using the computer as a tool integrated within their classroom curriculum. They further develop their use of the computer for writing and graphic design in conjunction with class multimedia presentations using software such as keynote, pages and powerpoint. Classroom teachers use garageband to help children develop fluency and add music to spoken poetry. They also use stop motion animation software for writing projects. Beginning in 3rd grade, Students receive a template to develop online portfolios. The portfolios provide entry point into teaching elements of web design, appropriate online communication, and collaboration. Each third grade student is provided with a digital camera, they are encouraged to become "photo journalists" and document their experiences through the city. Students also compare and contrast their own NY experiences with information found on the web to complete research projects about NYC. In science, students continue learning to write programs for lego robots using Robolab, an icon based programming language.
Students in grade 4 are expected to create written documents, graphic files, and individual multimedia presentations relating to the classroom curriculum. In Spanish, students make enhanced podcasts about Central America, and in Social studies, they make Public Service Announcments relating to the theme of justice. Integrated with the studies of population and history of America, students are introduced to reading and creating spreadsheets, simple formulas, and comparing data. The final year of robotics instruction helps children understand how robots use sensors for exploration. As new online collaboration tools emerge, such as voicethread, yakpack, and others, 4th grade uses them to communicate asynchronously. keyboarding is re-enforced to 4th grade with both software and web-based typing tutors. Portfolios are developed, with more emphasis on commenting and appropriate on-line citizenship skills.
Students in Grade 5 continue developing word processing, multimedia and graphic design skills throughout various social studies projects. In addition, there is a emphasis on research skills and learning about information technology; appropriate web searching, library resources and databases. With the strong geographic emphasis of grade 5's curriculum, students are introduced to Googlemaps and Google Earth to identify relevant areas, explore geographic climate information and retell stories from a geographic perspective. Students also use Google Sketchup to design 3d buildings, learning about 3d shapes, design principles and scale. Finally, students learn HTML tags to embed media and style elements to their online content. Students build their online portfolios from the ground up.
Students in Grade 6 continue to understand technology within the context of their various academic subjects. They reinforce existing skills across the curriculum while incorporating more advanced skills into new class projects that require the integration of technology. The technology students choose depends on the subject and what they believe will be appropriate to meet their individual needs.
Programs used and sample projects might include:
• iWeb (web authoring tool) incorporating digital images used for the timeline project, voice-overs, and titles; eventually exported as a Quicktime movie and displayed on our website
• Geometer's Sketchpad utilized in mathematics (translations with parallelograms and rotations with equilateral triangles), and in Visual Arts (Tesselations)
• The Social Networking Site where students learn how to maintain a digital profile and network “virtually” with each other in an acceptable academic manner
• iMovie or GarageBand to merge audio and digital images into a multimedia presentation of a scene from Shakespeare
Students in Grade 7 continue utilizing technology within their various subject areas and improving on the technical skills introduced and/or reinforced in the sixth grade. Programs used and sample projects have included:
• Tabla compositions using GarageBand
• Symbiosis presentations with Keynote
• Interactive Africa map/wiki
• Earth awareness newsletters in Pages
• Introduction to Elgg social networking using of Excel and Photoshop
In the 8th grade recognizing the impact of technology on society today and considering the far-reaching effect it will continue to have on our future endeavors, students in eighth grade work with a range of applications to write, collect, analyze and synthesize information and data in all media forms. They continued to have access to a variety of computer peripherals (scanners, digital cameras, camcorders). Programs used to increase their understanding, and sample projects demonstrating student facility have included GarageBand to remix the works of early American composers, Probeware with Logger Lite for studying kinematics, Keynote for presenting research on Atomic Theory, iMovie to document family trees, Flash for animated chemical reactions, and the Social Network using Elgg to learn how to be responsible and respectful citizens.
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