I searched several articles to find one I wanted to report on. I wanted something fairly recent. Most of the articles I read were similary to the Seirtec Newsletter and had similar information about handhelds. I finally found this article in the Penn State Live newsletter. It was written on March 23, 2005 and is titled “High-tech Tools Reduce Paperwork, Allow More Time For Teaching.”
The article is about the use of handhelds for special education teachers in Pennsylvania. Apparently one of the most difficult tasks for teachers is the monitoring of students’ progress in learning how to read, write, do math and more. The article stated that monitoring was essential to help students succeed in the classroom and in life, but the process of monitoring is time consuming and takes teachers away from teaching. The teachers needed an easier way to monitor the students. So the Pennsylvania Technical Assistance Network (PATTAN) part of the Pennsylvania Department of Education Bureau of Special Education provided $93,500 for 110 PDA’s for the pilot project which ran through June 30 2005. The Special Needs Assessment Programfor Progress Monitoring (SNAP-PM) “…was designed to give teachers a suite of technology that includes handheld computers or personal digital assistants (PDAs) and desktop computers loaded with specially designed software to collect and report student data” (”High-Tech…”, pg. 1). The project also included three Pennsylvania districts, the Continuing Education at University PArk and a corporation (TekResults, Ltd.) to work together and help the project succeed.
The project included 100 teachers, education consultants, administrative staff, and training by TekResults, Ltd. and Penn State. The article lists several comments from teachers who used the handhelds. Teachers used the handhelds for: 1) to measure students’ progress on goals and objectives; 2) assessment probes were designed to measure reading and writing fluency, math computation and applications skills. Students IEP’s were developed by their teachers and teachers stored specific goals for a student, collect data adn save data about the student’s progress on the handheld. Graphs were created to describe the student’s progress. “SNAP-PM will allow teachers to analyze data abd change educational strategies based on the results to better meet individual student needs” (”High-tech… pg. 2).
With the help of TekResults to train the teachers and create software for the handhelds, the teachers agreed to the project and PATTAN funded the project for one year. Evaluation of the software and training, was conducted with presurveys and postsurveys of teachers and parents. The teachers saw the handhelds “…constant tool in the classroom that a teacher can use to quickly record something and continute on with teaching” (”High-tech…” pg. 4).
I wanted to find the results of this program in Pennsylvania. I would also like to find the SNAP-PM, to see how it would work with our students with special needs. One of the biggest concerns teachers have to do additional, time consuming activities that take away from teaching. I wonder it this program would help us (Michelle Untalan and other counselors) to minimize the time consuming energy of documenting the progress of a student in our program. I was also thinking this program might help with behavior notations for citizenship grades or other rubric-like programs to give evidence for a certain citizenship grade. Something that can be done quickly while teaching would be good. Oftentimes, as teachers, we fail to document the incidents that occur and rely on our memories. It would be good to use the handheld and software for such situations. I will look into this further when I have more time. Something to continue the search to better help the students and teachers at St. John’s.
