Patience pays off as St. Joseph’s bulks up classroom technology

Using the desktop computers in Zanna Grandinetti’s classroom at St. Joseph’s School has always been a bit of a gamble.

“You’d plan an activity and then only three of the five would work,” the second-grade teacher said of the computers with mismatched monitors and keyboards.

Grandinetti and other school officials are hoping the days of relying on what has largely been hand-me-down technology are in the past. The Kennewick private school recently bought more than two dozen Google Chromebooks to share among its elementary classrooms as part of a $10,000 technology upgrade effort.

Teachers and most students have yet to be trained and that presents challenges, from teaching students the importance of remembering passwords to teachers realizing how best to use them in the classroom. There’s also the logistical hurdle of needing more bandwidth capacity to keep up with the wireless-dependent machines.

But school officials said they are excited about the opportunities the new computers will bring to the classroom. And while some students have struggled with using a trackpad instead of a mouse, they have taken to the new technology.

“It’s like any other computer but it’s nice because you can have it at your desk,” said second-grader Coppin Hunkapillar, 8.

The demands of technology have increasingly weighed on schools and many have poured money into upgrading internet access, building libraries of digital educational materials and putting more wireless devices into the hands of students, from laptops to tablets. The Richland School District over the past two years has bought nearly 3,000 Chromebooks, which have no hard drive and instead store documents and other files online.

But St. Joseph’s doesn’t have the same resources as public schools. That’s led the private school to use local schools’ cast-offs to get technology into its classrooms.

The school holds several fundraisers but those are used to cover a variety of expenses, from textbooks to science lab equipment. There is a fairly up-to-date computer lab in the school’s middle school but students visit that facility once per week. Technology upgrades are regularly requested by parents, said technology director Amanda Anderson.

“It is a matter of money,” said interim Principal Kathleen Cleary.

It was years of saving that allowed the district to buy the Chromebooks and the special cart to store them and move them between classrooms.

Grandinetti said that while she and her students are still familiarizing themselves with the thin notebook computers, she already sees a lot of potential for their use. She’s particularly interested in a program that can record students reading, which she can then play back to assess their fluency and reading level. There are also math programs and the online edition of the World Book encyclopedia.

Many St. Joseph’s students have access to the internet in one form or another at home and Grandinetti’s students were adapting quickly to the technology. But they’re still awed at what the machines can do, such as Aubree Harkins’ fascination with Google Docs, a word processing program.

“It’s just like writing on a piece of paper and you can send it to your teacher or anyone,” the 8-year-old said.

The school plans to install new fiber-optic line this spring. It also plans to buy another cart of Chromebooks next year for the middle school. There’s still a lot of training and adapting to do, but Anderson and others are optimistic about what this will do for student performance.

“The kids are going to skyrocket,” she said.

This story was originally published January 25, 2016 at 8:28 PM with the headline "Patience pays off as St. Joseph’s bulks up classroom technology."