District goes online with pilot program
Danette Goulet
NEWPORT-MESA -- By next year, selected Newport-Mesa elementary students
will be doing much of their schoolwork online at a Web site accessible by
their parents and teachers.
This interactive schooling will be part of a pilot program unanimously
approved by the school board Tuesday night for Rea and Newport elementary
schools.
The program, created by a start-up company called Computer Tooter, will
allow students to receive immediate feedback on their work while giving
teachers and parents a better idea about students’ progress.
As students answer problems contained in the online lesson, the program
will immediately say “good job” for a correct answer or, if it is
incorrect, a tutorial will pop up to assist them, said James Riskas, one
of three co-founders and the chief financial officer of Computer Tooter.
Teachers will also be able to immediately see if students have a grasp on
the work. Computer Tooter will diagnose what skills the child has or is
lacking in each subject, Riskas said.
“Teachers can evaluate each child’s strengths and weaknesses on a
real-time basis,” he said. “As soon as the child is done, the information
is available to a teacher.”
Parents will also be able to go online with or after their child is
finished, using a special identification code. Teachers will be able to
determine the level of parent’s involvement by seeing how often parents
visit the Web site.
Computer Tooter is the brainchild of Scott Gayner, whose son suffers from
learning disabilities. At the suggestion of his son’s teacher, Gayner
attempted to find a computer program to help his son, but found that such
a program did not exist.
So, with Robert Small, the third co-founder, they developed a program
that would use technology to assist teachers in better meeting students’
needs.
“It reduces the amount of time a teacher spends grading papers and frees
them up to concentrate on what you really want a teacher to be doing --
teaching,” Gayner said. “It makes them more effective and leaves them
time to access students and do what they need to do for intervention.”
While Computer Tooter is currently negotiating with other school
districts in Orange County, Newport-Mesa has offered the first
contractual agreement.
Teachers from Rea and Newport will begin meeting with programmers from
Computer Tooter this summer to develop Web-based lesson plans to be
incorporated into their day-to-day plans next year.
At Rea, two classes in each of three grade levels -- four, five and six
-- will take part in the program, reaching about 180 students.
Students will be randomly chosen to participate in the first year, said
Rea Principal Ken Killian, but fourth-grade students will continue to
work in the program throughout their remaining years at Rea.
Rea was chosen as the Costa Mesa school to participate because Killian
had already decided to develop a technology academy in an effort to
improve student learning.
“The goal was to significantly infuse technology into our school to see
if it makes a difference in our academic achievement,” Killian said. “The
main purpose is to improve learning for at-risk students, so this was a
real windfall for us.”
One of the selling points of the pilot program was that while it benefits
Newport-Mesa students, it will cost the district nothing.
The new company plans to raise the funds through corporate, institutional
and individual donors, with a proposed budget of $5 million for the first
year of the program.
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