Downers Grove School District 58
Downers Grove, Illinois
Dr. Connie Hodson, Director of Technology

Downers Grove Boosts Writing Skills with IntelliTools Classroom Suite

Downers Grove District 58, located in a suburb of Chicago, has a lot going for it. It is ranked as one of the top K-8 districts in the state and a substantial majority of its students meet or exceed the Illinois Learning Standards, as measured on standardized tests. District educators are committed to a curriculum that "inspires children, sparks creative thinking and celebrates diversity" and a number of Downers Grove teachers are comfortable using technology to teach.

But Downers Grove has not been satisfied to stand still. Test scores, while relatively high, have not risen dramatically in recent years – creating a challenge when it comes to demonstrating adequate yearly progress under the NCLB program. And, as in most districts, there continues to be a gap between high-achieving students and those who struggle, as well as between teachers who understood how to lead with technology and those who see themselves as just learning.

RAISING THE BAR

At the start of the 2004-2005 school year, IntelliTools teamed up with Dr. Connie Hodson, District 58’s director of technology and an Apple Distinguished Educator, to establish an "action research" project to help Downers Grove students improve their language arts skills. They decided to focus on the use of technology to improve K-3 writing – an area that the team saw as crucial to establishing a solid learning foundation on which to build.

More specifically, the goal was to help students improve in:

• Punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure;
• Sequencing and complete sentences;
• Spelling, phonics and phonemic awareness;
• Word choice, words and phrases;
• Paragraphs and stories.

In addition to boosting student achievement, the project had two other goals: to document the role technology can play in improving learning and to explore staff development approaches that help primary grade teachers become more comfortable integrating technology into their classrooms.

According to Hodson, none of the K-3 teachers who participated in the research were resistant or afraid of technology but only a few of them were using it extensively for teaching in the classroom. Her hope was that a project focusing on day-to-day learning activities, with ongoing support for faculty, would have a lasting impact on their teaching approaches.

IntelliTools Classroom Suite was chosen as the software for the project. "In addition to being a great general-purpose tool for multimedia authoring," says Hodson, "it is excellent for differentiated learning." With a variety of Universal Design features, including the ability to have text read aloud, insert oral prompts, control the software with a switch, mouse or keyboard, and turn scanning on or off, IntelliTools Classroom Suite lends itself well to a wide range of learning styles and needs.

The IntelliTools professional development team, working closely with Connie Hodson and others at Downers Grove, constructed an eight-week plan involving 13 teachers, K-3. Most participants were from two schools whose principals had expressed a strong interest, although the project also included a few other mentor teachers – known in the district as “Suities” because of their commitment to help others learn to use IntelliTools Classroom Suite.

GETTING UP TO SPEED

The project began with an inservice conducted on-site by IntelliTools' national consultant, Rick McAtee. In Hodson's opinion, this initial session set the tone for a successful staff development experience because of its “just in time” approach. "He didn't try to teach everything at once – just covered enough ground for the teachers to feel comfortable using the software in week one," she explains. "After that, things built gradually, with a weekly email from Rick, explaining the next week's activity along with suggestions about how to customize it." Based on the project's goals and the Illinois state standards, eight lessons were selected from the array of ready-made templates and activities available to all IntelliTools Classroom Suite users. Early sessions involved easy writing templates that allowed pre- and beginning readers to use labeled, read-aloud pictures to complete sentences beginning with such phrases as "Fall is …" or "I like…" Other activities included: journal writing, with students typing or selecting from a word list; retelling a favorite fairy tale by sequencing illustrated sentences; and creating slide shows with photographic backgrounds and typed-in text.

Each lesson built on the concepts introduced the previous week. Students and teachers explored different aspects of the software together as they played with language and talked about the elements of complete, informative and correctly-punctuated sentences. Every participant was committed to spending one hour a week on these activities. This took different forms in different classrooms – with some teachers devoting 15-minutes a day to a large-group activity and others carving out a longer block of time in the computer lab for students to work independently.

THE RESULTS

Several methods were used to measure the impact of the project. The most formal assessment took the form of writing samples collected from students at the beginning, middle, and end of the eight-week unit. These were analyzed by the teachers with help from Rick McAtee. Teachers' comments and classroom observations by Connie Hodson contributed important anecdotal evidence.

Progress was observed in all of the following areas:

Language Arts Skills
Based on class participation and writing samples, teachers reported improvement in their students' language skills – especially when it came to understanding sentence components and being able to write in complete sentences with consistent beginning and ending punctuation. The weekly reinforcement of these skills clearly paid off. As second grade teacher Lynn Hoff wrote during the project, "My kids are enjoying and learning so much! Their comfort level with nouns and verbs has increased dramatically as has their understanding of complete sentences versus phrases. Now when I have them even doing a quick write, there is no question about any of the items necessary in a sentence."

Since the ISAT writing test will not be administered to primary grade students until 2007, the standardized testing validation will have to wait a while. But the writing samples tell a positive story and the teachers are optimistic that other great results will follow. Here’s how learning resource teacher Taffy Sanger describes the progress kindergarteners in her school have made: "We have modified things a bit to fit our needs but the results are FABULOUS!! Observers in the school are very impressed – we have upper grade teachers wishing we were doing the same thing with their classes and they can't wait till this current kindergarten class reaches their grade. These little kindergartners are [chanting the rules for complete sentences] around the school. They really discovered it and apply it!"

Motivation
As is clear from the comments above, the students found the work highly enjoyable. "We are having a lot of fun with this," added second grade teacher Maureen Chmel. "The kids love it and are totally engaged!" Connie Hodson noted similar enthusiasm in other classes she observed. "A group of second graders I watched working with IntelliTools Classroom Suite in the lab were on task for a full hour – and that's impressive for seven-year-olds." She adds, "Motivation is hard to measure, and sometimes we dismiss it as unimportant. But it actually makes a huge difference. And motivation showed up big time in this project!"

Success for a Wide Range of Students
Teachers observed that IntelliTools Classroom Suite's built-in support for spell checking, word prediction, and spoken text helped their struggling readers and reluctant writers be successful. As Lynn Hoff pointed out in an email to Rick McAtee, the lessons offered an opportunity for the students to learn in a multi-sensory way. "Your plans have allowed them to work with sentence structure on the computer (kinesthetic) as they manually press the space bar to separate words and the periods or other punctuation marks to complete a sentence [which they can then hear read aloud]. They also have the opportunity to practice that skill in the classroom as they write using paper and pencil. The cards on their desks [with letters to remind them of the sentence rules] are a great reference for them. We touch the letters all the time to reinforce the concepts."

One of the unexpected results of the project, according to Hodson, was that the software allowed students to be given personalized assignments in an anonymous way that had great potential for improved confidence and self-esteem. "Teachers found that when students were using the computer, the perception was that everybody was doing the same thing. With pencil-and-paper activities, students are very aware when a classmate's assignment looks different from their own. On the computer, it wasn't obvious since students are used to seeing different screens at different times. Everybody seemed to feel good about the work they were doing, regardless of the difficulty level or the way the program had been adapted to meet their needs."

Student and Teacher Collaboration
Hodson also observed an increase in collaboration on the part of both students and teachers as they learned to use the software and worked on the lessons selected for the project. "In the classroom, you would often hear students saying 'You can use this over here' or 'Let's ask somebody how to do it.'" As an example, she describes one class session in which students were retelling the story of Charlotte's Web in pictures and words. "One student knew how to use the animated story feature and began showing others. In a short period of time, it went from one student to the whole class knowing how to do it."

Similarly, the teachers consulted one another on everything from technical questions to how best to structure a particular lesson or customize one of the IntelliTools templates for their own classroom. Having a common goal and shared technology tools resulted in valuable idea exchanges across the grades.

Technology Integration
For Connie Hodson, one of the greatest successes of the project was how effective it was at making the technology "transparent" to the participants. While computers have been used in Downers Grove's primary grade classrooms for several years, she says, it is rare for the district's K-3 teachers to use the technology as a primary delivery method for instruction. "When they were working with the IntelliTools lessons," she says, "they forgot about the technology. They just knew they were teaching."

While the students clearly enjoyed spending time at the computer, their focus also moved beyond the technology as they worked. Whether they were unscrambling sentences, creating multimedia stories, or reminding one another about the rules for a complete sentence, Hodson says, "they were focused on the content, not the computer."

NEXT STEPS

Downers Grove plans to continue partnering with IntelliTools, introducing more K-3 educators to IntelliTools Classroom Suite and helping the kindergarten and first grade teachers learn how to pace the lessons for younger students. Hodson and the IntelliTools professional development team will also be exploring additional ways of gauging student progress.

Furthermore, Hodson says, “The model used in the pilot was so successful we are adopting it throughout the district for all technology implementations." Downers Grove's experience with this project has validated her belief – one that she shares with leading experts in the professional development field – that job-embedded staff development, which builds over time and relates to daily classroom learning, is far more effective than one-shot technology inservices.

The district is experimenting with other technology projects as well – including a laptop program for students in grades 4-6. It looks likely that participants in the K-3 IntelliTools project will be clamoring for extra computer time for their young students as well. As one of them put it, "If all the children were doing this on their own computers all the time, how powerful it would be!"