From Textbooks to Tablets, History in the Making at Coginchaug

Classrooms are changing. Pencils and blackboards have been replaced by iPads and Smart Boards. Throughout Regional School District 13, teachers and students have embraced the change. This week, Patch asks teachers in Durham and Middlefield to share their stories about the impact technology has had in the classroom.

Teachers: Julie Lagace, Tony Pulino and Nate Fisher

School: Coginchaug Regional High School (Grade 11)

Technology: Google Nexus 7 tablet computers, with an assortment of free applications and resources including Socrative, e-books, and Google Drive.

How have students benefited from the technology?  Socrative provides an instant diagnostic tool to measure understanding and modify instruction as needed. Teachers can pose questions and get feedback from students right away. Students are also benefiting from teachers being able to direct them to a variety of resources in a variety of formats right away. For example, Mrs. Lagace’s US History students are doing a webquest on the Jim Crow south. Each student is directed to a different online source (podcasts, museum sites, readings) and has questions to answer or tasks to perform. They then use Google Drive to share their findings with classmates and ‘jigsaw’ with other students who have different information in order to answer the essential question of the unit:  How did the legal equality African-Americans gain during Reconstruction compare with the social reality of the Jim Crow South?

In another example, as part of their ‘Road to Freedom’ project, Mr. Pulino and Mr. Fisher’s American Studies students worked in groups to research aspects of the shift from slavery to freedom and employed their tablets to use  an interactive teaching tool (Twitter, Socrative, etc.) to teach their fellow students about their assigned period and assess their understanding.

Memorable moment: Students have been genuinely excited about the shift from textbooks to tablets and many teachers have reported that the students in the pilot are using their devices appropriately to support their work in their other classes.