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Dogsled races help Poe Elementary students learn math

May 24, 2002 - Computers are an important tool in Kathy Betancourt's classroom of fourth- and fifth-grade students at Poe Montessori Magnet School. The idea of teaching elementary school students in a Montessori classroom and using technology to help their research led Betancourt back into the classroom.

Kathy Betancourt, Poe Elementary teacher

"A computer is a helpful tool, especially in upper elementary in Montessori where the big emphasis is on research," Betancourt said. "We teach them to be self-learners. They choose topics to research. Sometimes they just research for me and sometimes they present to the class. We teach them how to find information on the internet or through online encyclopedias, and how to cite the material, so they are able to really do their own learning."

Students Pagan Lenz and Joshua Chang eagerly describe their work. Lenz is a fifth grader who works on the school's web page development team. Chang, a fourth-grader, has been busy working on classroom projects.

"I'm a web page designer," Lenz said. "What I'm doing is creating a web page for a first-grade class."

Lenz worked with teacher Susie Click, investigating activities in Click's classroom, taking photos, and reporting what she found.

"I use a digital camera," Lenz said. "I go to their class. If they are outside and working, I'll take pictures of different things like Ms. Susie, or the kids, or the animals. Our camera saves the pictures to a floppy disk. I just put the floppy in the computer, open up the pictures, and put them in."

The class website has photos of Click, the class rabbit, and the guinea pig that replaced the rabbit.

Meanwhile, Chang explains they worked earlier this year with PowerPoint and Excel to collect and display information about the Alaskan Iditarod and Black History Month.

"For the Iditarod, we were to pick a musher, the person who drives the dogs," Joshua said. "After we did that, we had a lot of assignments. We had to keep track of where they were every day. We had to put facts up on the board. At the end, we made a spreadsheet about it. We put the miles they did that day. We followed them to the end."

Betancourt spurred the students' interest in Alaska, sled dogs, Excel spreadsheets, and math as they followed the Iditarod dogsled race in March.

"They build a table and convert it to a chart," Betancourt said. "Then they compare the mileage the musher went in a particular day and factors such as amount of daylight, weather, number of dogs that he had on his sled. Then they are asked to draw some conclusions, to see if there is a pattern that can help them see how the factors affected the miles the musher went. They were into the race. They said, 'Mine finished on day 14. Yours had to go all the way to day 16.' The information they are communicating is the miles traveled in a day and the factors that contributed to that."

Students at work on a compute project in Batencourt's classroom.

Betancourt said the project helped students to research and communicate.

"Rather than just having exercises to use a spreadsheet, they are actually trying to communicate information to me that they have found," Betancourt said. "I used to teach second grade. My first day, I would ask the kids, 'Why do you read?' They would say, 'To get good grades.' That's why they read. They don't know that there is a reason for reading because we teach reading simply as a subject. We don't tell them, 'Pick up a book and read. Enjoy a book. Enjoy stories.' They read to get grades. That's what they see all education as being. By doing projects, they see the computer as a communication tool. If I do a separate exercise on a spreadsheet, then it's to get a grade. The project work makes it real."

Projects like the Iditarod help students with math, but Betancourt said the computer can be an effective tool for language arts instruction, too.

"We all know in writing, you need to do several drafts to get it right," Betancourt said. "Your first draft, you're getting your ideas down. You need a draft to refine your ideas. You need a draft to refine the mechanics, capital letters, and punctuation. Before we used computers on a regular basis, students would balk at rewrites because they would have to do the whole thing over. Most of the revisions would be simple mechanics. They wouldn't want to add anything because that would mean they would have to write the whole thing again. They didn't want to add details. If you allow them to do their drafts on a computer, they are willing to go back and insert. If I told them to rewrite it, they would say, 'No. Its fine.' It really moves them along in their writing skills."

Betancourt said word processing programs help strengthen student spelling. Underlined spelling mistakes signal a student to check words helping them learn correct spelling. As children develop as writers, Betancourt said they also become interested in reading.

Betancourt's use of technology as an instructional tool has attracted the interest of other teachers.

"Once you show them the projects and they see that the students did it, they become excited," Betancourt said. "I have a bulletin board of facts the students pulled from the Internet. When they see PowerPoint presentations the kids have done, they ask 'Children did that?' They learned it in no time and they put them together."

Betancourt said its also important to share what you have learned with others, providing the lessons and taking the time to share the technology. She said it's important that you know what you're trying to accomplish with a project.

"The end is not a PowerPoint presentation, the end is what you wanted them to research in that PowerPoint presentation," Betancourt said. "Know where it is you want to get to and have steps on how to accomplish it. With the Iditarod project, I gave them a sheet that said, 'These are the things we are doing. This is when they are due, and this is how many points you earn here.' You plan it out. Let the students know what makes a successful project."

Betancourt's grade book is on the computer, especially important she says in tracking each student's progress in a Montessori classroom. The teachers at her school share and work to improve the computer tools that make classroom management simpler.

"I use Excel all the time," Betancourt said. "I can plug in the grades for a particular objective. My math grade book is not filled with scores from worksheets. It has objective 1.12 and what that objective is. What I do is have a quick chart and I do the standard of 80 percent accuracy shows mastery. I turn it into a bar graph and students scoring below 80 percent, I know I need to give a lesson to. I pull them aside and do another lesson. It really helps me to plan my day because in a Montessori classroom, you do your lesson plans day by day. At the end of the day, you look at what you've got and see what you are doing tomorrow. Without a computer, I don't know if I could do it."

After eight years of teaching in a traditional classroom, Betancourt, left to become a technology consultant. She helped Wake County teachers understand the school system's computer operating system. She worked closely with media specialists and technology resource teachers. During this time, she worked with another educator to write a book, 'Bringing Children and the Internet Together' that explains her use of technology in the classroom. In the classes, she also met educators who encouraged her to consider Poe Elementary. When Betancourt looked to return to the classroom, Poe had an opening. She now shares her love of Montessori and knowledge of technology with the school's students and teachers.