The technology program at All Saints Catholic Academy continues to expand to keep up with the best technology for our educational opportunities. Every grade from Pre-K – 8th is outfitted with state-of-the-art classroom technology ranging from Touch View Technology to e-beams to Apple iPad/TV. In addition, our stationary technology lab features 18 Apple iMac’s and our newer mobile lab features 20 MacBook Pros. Both of these technology labs are used throughout the day by all classes as teachers look to use technology to augment and enhance their current lessons.
We have taken several precautions to ensure the safety of our students who utilize the Internet and we are incredibly proud of the responsibility shown by our students. There is a genuine appreciation for this incredible technology and it is something our students do not take for granted. Great care is taken by each teacher to guide the students as they navigate these new opportunities. If you have not already done so, please stop by to check out our lab in action!
Here are some snippets of what students are up to:
With state-of-the-art Apple iMac computers, our students take their twenty-first century learning to a whole new level! Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students use the multi-media lab and the Sally Ride EarthKam program to communicate with the International Space Station and take photos of various landforms around the world. Using the lab, students are introduced to concepts like telemetry, orbiting windows, weather forecasting, latitude, longitude and altitude. They are challenged to scan projected orbits, to identify obstacles to those orbits, and to select the correct orbit for the region in which they were interested.
There are also several opportunities for collaborative learning within the school using our new technology. Seventh and eighth graders have partnered with the fourth graders to create All Saints Catholic Academy movie trailers using iMovie technology. Students created interview questions, focusing on different parts of the school to showcase all the great people and events of the school.
Third grade recently has created informative planet brochures to augment their learning relative to the solar system. Each student focused on a planet, and created a travel brochure with facts and photos. Students in third grade worked on much, much more in addition to science in the lab. It is also a big hit to utilize different multiplication sites, incorporating a little friendly competition in helping to memorize facts. Most students agree, it’s a nice change of pace from the fact sheets they frequently use in class!
Fourth graders have enjoyed learning about programming by participating in Hour of Code, an introduction to computer programming. Students really liked learning what goes into the creation of apps – on all devices. Learning how they work was both interesting and helped her learn.
