Connecting classrooms-Hellgate Elementary principal writes book on bringing technology to schools

Hellgate Elementary school principal Bruce Whitehead’s fifth book "Planning for Technology," deals with how educators can implement today’s technology in the classroom, tailoring the curriculum to fit individual students’ needs.

Hellgate Elementary principal writes book on bringing technology to schools

By JANE RIDER of the Missoulian

At conferences and conventions across the country, wherever Bruce Whitehead spoke about Hellgate Elementary’s technology program, people told him he needed to write a book about how to successfully integrate computers in classrooms.

So about two years ago, Whitehead, an elementary school principal and adjunct professor at the University of Montana, started writing.

Last month, the product of his work – "Planning For Technology: A Guide for School Administrators, Technology Coordinators and Curriculum Leaders" – hit bookshelves nationally through Corwin Press.

"This will be a guide for school leaders to provide specific strategies that have worked before," he said. "To use that in their schools to raise the bar, to allow teachers to do a better job with their students."

The 230-page soft-covered text is intermixed with personal experience, current research and practical activities in which school officials can explore how to best adapt their situation.

The first few chapters provide the rationale for a technology shift, including case studies and research findings that show how properly implemented technology can improve student achievement.

The book outlines how administrators can plan and lead to get a technology initiative off the ground and find creative ways to fund it. It also discusses other keys to success such as teacher training.

Most research indicates teachers do not receive essential training needed to effectively implement computers into curriculum, Whitehead said.

"Schools spend vast amounts of money on bringing computers into the school and then provide little professional development for teachers," Whitehead said. "Most recommendations indicate that 30 percent of a technology budget should be for professional development."

For years, school administrators and teachers have struggled with appropriate and relevant ways to integrate technology into curriculum.

"The problem we’ve had is we had a lot of early technology that really didn’t work well," he said. "Just like any new innovation, there are going to be some problems. We didn’t have the hardware, the speed, the connectivity, the software. You fought with the printer."

Teachers didn’t have the time to spend on such things and technology struggled for a while.

Nowadays, with Pentium IIIs and high-speed Internet access, the issue isn’t the quality of the machines so much as the amount of access students have to them.

While 84 percent of teachers have at least one computer in their classroom, only 36 percent have between two and five and a scant 10 percent have more than five class computers. Most schools locate the majority of their computers not within the individual classrooms but in specialized computer labs that are shared among all classes, Whitehead wrote.

Far too often, schools have depended on computer labs as their sole outlet to help students and teachers with the integration process. The weakness with this approach, Whitehead said, is that teachers are bound by limited timeframes and schedules for computer use.

"You are lucky to get access one day and then you have it for 40 minutes," he said.

Hellgate Elementary is an exception. Each classroom has at least six networked computers to a class.

Hellgate is also using computers to electronically monitor student academic growth through tests that adapt to the individual and generate accurate and immediate feedback. With the data, teachers can more efficiently target remedial resources to pupils who score below their grade level and offer more challenging projects and reading materials to those who excel above the rest of their classmates.

The test questions adapt as the students provide answers, becoming more difficult with each correct answer and less difficult when a student answers wrong.

Whitehead is best known for his work in developing a model for implementing technology into Montana’s classrooms via classroom technology centers. Former Gov. Marc Racicot appointed him chairman of Montana’s first Governor’s Task Force on Technology Education.

He helped set up the education technology system for Montana and has traveled extensively as an international speaker.

He was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Sept. 11, 2001, during the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., with a team of international consultants by invitation of King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz to help in the restructuring of the Saudi educational system.

The effort is currently on hold due to the potential war with Iraq, he said.

"We’ll be using aspects of the book to help with that program," he said. "If we’re invited back, the book will be a major part of that."

As a result of his state and national work in education, Hellgate Elementary has been recognized as a national demonstration site for educational technology by the U.S. president, secretary of education and members of Congress.

"This is good PR for Missoula and Montana," he said. "Here, rural Montana is one of the major leaders in technology education nationally and internationally."

The book is available for $34.95 through Corwin Press at corwinpress.com. or by calling 1-800-818-7243.

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