Friday, September 5, 2008

O'Neill Student leads South Dakota school

This week on Coach Peterson's Blog, the question was asked:
Lucky?
I have presented to different school districts this summer and have come to realize that we are VERY lucky in O'Neill to have access to the technology that we have.

Talk this week about if you have experienced this in your situation. Do you have friends in other school districts that are jealous of your 24/7 laptop access? Do you know of other schools that are doing what we are doing?


One student's response:
Brett Rash said...

Actually I have, I kind of have a funny story on that front:

My cousin (goes to school in Armor South Dakota) recruited me to help her get laptops at her school. Her school is about 150 people max, that's counting teachers, so it isn't a very expensive program for them.

I went to Armour, in a series of 5 meetings over the course of a week in front of the Armor school board I talked about how we have these laptops at school here in O'Neill. I had my flash drive with me (it had all of the projects and other things I had done on my mac). I also took my report card from 1 year without the macs and my report card of the 2nd semester with them! There was an improvement, whether it was the mac or not I really don't know but it was convincing.

Anyhow, I presented all of this at these meetings, and the board was impressed with the program, they saw potential in it, they wanted to see me use one of the macs but I didn't have one and all they had was a Windows laptop there, it didn't matter. My cousin and I even demonstrated another situation, it was write a paragraph about George Washington, my cousin took her 'W' encyclopedia and I took Google, Wiki, Encyclopedia.com, and other websites, even the encyclopedia installed on the PC, I had the paragraph typed and printed in under 10 minutes. She had a notebook, pencil, and Encyclopedia and she was still writing her first few sentences in that time!

So, overall I would have to say we are lucky to have these laptops at OHS, and they are lucky to have them in Armour now too =D, that's right it worked they got laptops, granted they liked the way O'Neill did things, they are going to give them to Juniors and Seniors the 2nd Semester this year.

They want me to come back and show a group of students how to use the Macs, the teachers are, of course, going to special pro training but the board said students will learn better from other students.

Again, I think we are more than lucky to have these laptops, my friends at my old school, Gregory South Dakota, are jealous of this Mac program we have and are kinda angry I helped Armour and not Gregory! Gregory would be slightly more expensive than the program in Armour though.

2 comments:

Becky D said...

South Dakota is also lucky because they have grants for one to one computers, the schools have to pay very little to purchase computers for their students. Corsica, South Dakota a town located 10 miles north of Armour has had 1 to 1 laptops for their students for a couple of years now. What is neat about this is that these two schools share teachers because their school populations are declining.
Good Job Brett!

Brett said...

Thanks Mrs. Dean, I remember the Armour board mentioning something about surrounding schools having 1:1 laptops, they didn't really say what schools though.