Oregon district uses
Kidspiration to strengthen
student reading and writing skills
Students at the Canby School District in Canby, Ore, are getting extra reading and writing help this year-from technology. The school board implemented a district-wide focus on reading and writing for the 2001-2002 school year. To fund the program, the district applied for and received a Technology Literacy Challenge Grant given by the State Department of Education.
Kidspiration was picked as one of the key software programs to help K-3 teachers use technology to boost reading and writing skills. With nearly 400 licenses of Kidspiration installed in the district's five elementary schools, all teachers have access to the program. Jennifer Gingerich, a
district technology trainer, helped evaluate Kidspiration for inclusion in the program: "Kidspiration is a wonderful program for our primary students. As I evaluated Kidspiration for the first time, I just kept saying 'wow!' as
I discovered all the features geared specifically to help students learn to read and write."
Fall 2001 focused on integrating Kidspiration into the curriculum. Kidspiration implementation began with a planning day for the district technology integration team, a group consisting of one teacher from each grade level at each school. The team first received training on Kidspiration, followed by a discussion of benchmarks to be met in reading and writing. Based on this planning, the representative teachers created reading/writing and technology lesson plan templates in Kidspiration to be distributed to all district teachers and saved to the district server.
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As part of the technology integration plan, all district K-3 teachers were then trained on Kidspiration and how to use it with students. Gingerich visited each classroom to provide a model lesson to help teachers become more confident using the technology for instruction.
One of the model activities Gingerich created was designed for use with Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?, a popular children's book. After reading the book to her class, kindergarten teacher Patti Monte then took them to the computer lab where each student created a web in Kidspiration using symbols to represent what they saw.
According to Gingerich, the students enjoy using Kidspiration. "This activity helps to reinforce what the kids have read, and bring a part of
themselves into what they are reading. To help students learn to read and write we need to get them excited about what they are reading and help them make a personal connection with the story."
See "Kidspiration creates buzz with students" on p. 2 for another example of how Canby School District teachers are using Kidspiration in their classrooms.
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