Product Review
TSFS’s Technology Integration
Kit
By Mitchell Levine
To successfully implement a technology program for your school
that will actually impact learning, you need more than just
hardware. Simply spending hundreds of thousands or millions
of dollars on the latest G5 Macs, media cards, and even tutorial
software will not increase testing scores in itself. Many schools,
even in the New York area have tried, and sadly some have failed.
I hear about it every day.
For an educational institution to incorporate technology and
receive benefits from it, it must: 1) have tangible goals;
and 2) integrate that technology into the classroom experience
in an effective way. Those are not easy things to accomplish;
our schools’ planning is already being strained under
the weight of federal guidelines and high stakes testing, and
teachers in our schools are spending much of their time gearing
their instruction to meet those demands.
Fortunately, an experienced company like Technology Solutions
for Schools is available to take the guesswork out of the process
with their Technology Integration Kit. After many years of
designing and implementing technology programs for schools
around the country, including the NYC area, TSFS has put together
a prefab system combining lesson plans, fact guides, and actual
projects for participation in a broad number of different curricular
areas, each with complete instructions for busy teachers.
Arranged around the calendar year, a typical school should
be able to put together projects for classes graded from kindergarten
through 8th grade sufficient to provide enrichment for 12 months
of instruction. The actual kit I received contained lesson
plans and guides both in hard copy and CD-Rom covering writing & grammar,
poetry, American history and the presidents, logic, literature,
math and a great deal more. Projects include a brief breakdown
for the content material, a lesson plan for teachers, a guide
to assessment, and a full description of all related activities.
As a selected example, the math lesson concerning charts and
graphs I reviewed offers suggestions for discussion, a detailed
walk-through of an activity session teaching basic spreadsheet
usage, a number of advanced demonstrations of the same, and
a series of questions and problems designed to assess mastery
of the topic. A rubric of all activities for both student and
teacher was provided, and a careful summary of standards met
for different subjects was discussed.
In
fact, all the projects have been carefully aligned to state
standards for the ease of administrative planners. For any
teacher or technology manager in our schools interested in
getting the most from their investment in hardware, the Technology
Integration Kit should a strong consideration. More information
is available at the company’s site www.k8technologyprojects.com,
or by dialing 877-228-9604 toll-free.
