Kuemper students experience mobile lab

By KATIE LEFEBVRE, Globe staff reporter
May 19, 2005

CARROLL - Kuemper Grade School-St. Lawrence Center has a new addition to its school that will enhance computer and classroom knowledge for students as well as teachers.

A mobile computer lab was purchased for the St. Lawrence Center and has 26 wireless laptop computers that travels to different classrooms each day. There is a CD burner and DVD player on each computer. Printing for the system is wireless as well. The teachers can utilize the mobile lab to teach science, English, social studies, religion, math or almost any subject.

Since there is not an elevator in the St. Lawrence building to transport the lab downstairs for the sixth graders to use, the seventh and eighth grade students are the only students currently able to use the computers.

"We do have plans of purchasing a mobile lab for the sixth grade floor, then also for the fourth and fifth grade center at St. Angela and Kuemper High School as well," said Mary Trent, technology integration specialist for Kuemper.

The funding to purchase the mobile lab came from a combination of the parents club and their fundraisers and the SCRIP program. Trent added that future funding for the mobile labs will most likely come out of the Kuemper capital campaign.

"We developed an incentive program called Kuemper University," said Trent. "We offer training to the teachers. They attend training sessions and create integration projects. They share them with each other. If they meet certain requirements for each level of our program, then they are awarded with technology money that they can use in their classrooms for technology for the next year."

Kuemper University got the teachers interested in doing technology projects in their classrooms, noted Trent. Then came the mobile lab in February/March.

"It was very helpful for us to have been working all year training teachers on how to integrate technology into the classroom," said Trent. "When the mobile lab came, it just took right off. It is busy every single day."

According to Trent, the teachers are having the students do different kinds of integration projects with the computers including a timeline to show geological time periods and research on the Internet about the pope. A religion class is putting their findings about the pope into a PowerPoint presentation to share with their classmates.

"With the mobile lab, it goes right into the teachers classroom," said Trent. "They are in their own environment. I go with the lab most of the time, especially if it is the first time for the teacher to use it, so that they feel comfortable. There are a lot of teachers who are comfortable with it now, and they will just take it."

Each of the students has a folder on the school's network, so any computer they log onto, including the laptops, will have access to all of their documents.

"It has been working great," said Trent. "The kids have completely respected the value of the laptop - as far as being safe with them, taking care of them, being really responsible. If they see something odd pop up, they ask for help right away. One thing we have noticed, that we kind of expected but was pleasant to see, is that when we are using the mobile lab we have 100 percent on task learning. The kids are focused on it from the time they sit down until the time class is over."

The one lab between the seventh and eighth grade seems to still not be enough since there are teachers who want to use it more than once a day, Trent stated. There are four sections of each seventh and eighth grade and the mobile lab can only run for about four class periods a day. If two teachers want to use the mobile lab for all four sections in one day, they may have to use the stationary computer lab as well. There is some compromise that goes on.

"We try to accommodate," said Trent. "The kids work harder. They let their creativity flow a lot easier. They tend to do a lot more when they are given the opportunity to use the laptops."

Trent commented that the more the teachers use the mobile lab, the more opportunities they see to use it to enhance their teaching. Many of the textbooks come with resources for on-line Web sites that go with the textbook that are very valuable.

"It is pretty cool and awesome because we don't have to just sit there and look at the board and listen to the teacher. We can actually go on the computers and look things up," said Chad Heiman, seventh grader at the St. Lawrence Center. "We have done research projects in social studies, typed some paragraphs in English and a bunch of other fun stuff."

Melanie Dettmann, a teacher at the St. Lawrence Center who has been able to use the mobile lab in her seventh grade social studies and English classes, expressed that she loves the mobile lab. She added that they are able to research everything from Shakespeare inquiries to Renaissance to the Middle Ages in her classroom with the lab.

"It is their future and how they are going to do things," said Dettmann.