Great Ed Tech Story: K-5 Summer Tech camp changes lives for low SES students

4 week Technology Camp has a great impact on students who had no previous computer access.

The Challenge
Dallas McPheeters was asked to prepare a Summer Technology camp for 430 students in an elementary school near the US/Mexico border. All the school had to offer to facilitate this was a set of eight year old PCs running Windows 2000. McPheeters applied for Title I funds and ultimately secured a new lab with 13 iMacs.

The Approach
The summer lesson plans were rather demanding, and had students using a variety of web tools from Apple’s iLife product suite. McPheeters put together a web site where all assignments were posted and instructions were provided.

Students created personal web pages using Apple’s iWeb application and used iPhoto to create a visual history project. The next assignment called for using Garageband to create a video blog where they were instructed to “explain your summer school project or what you enjoy best and fear most”.

[Please click here to read the complete post at EmergingEdTech.com, where I blog regularly about the use of Internet tools in education, and other instructional technologies. Thanks!]