December 2007 — Special Feature
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THE Journal's 2007 Innovators : 1
Paul Larson
Alicia Cortez Elementary School (CA)
Paul Larson, sixth-grade teacher and technology coordinator
at Alicia Cortez Elementary School in Chino, CA, outside
Los Angeles, had a problem: He couldn't keep a lab tech aide.
Two staffers left for other jobs, and a third got pregnant and
then stayed home to care for her baby. Out of options and in a
bind, Larson turned to his sixth-grade students, showing them
all around the lab and even giving them lab coats.
That was three years ago. Today, Larson's sixth-grade students are all the aides he needs. A trained, skilled group, they even have a name: The Computer Company. Among their other responsibilities, they help younger students find their way around the machines.
The tech-savvy student crew is the payoff from a technology literacy program Larson introduced in 2004, which he began in response to Cortez Elementary's determination that it needed to teach its students technology skills through interactive lessons. Larson wanted the students to be able to take these skills and apply them to meaningful tasks and solve real-word problems. So he implemented EasyTech. EasyTech is a web-delivered K-8 program from Learning.com that integrates technology into math, science, language arts, and social studies curricula. The program is self-paced and teaches topics like using keyboards (grades K to 2), graphing in spreadsheets (3 to 5), and creating slide shows (6 to 8).
EasyTech was an immediate success. The school has seen an increase in its Adequate Yearly Progress scores every year since the program launched, especially among English language learners and low-income students. Larson, who taught, then got an advanced degree to be an administrator, then returned to teaching because he missed working with the kids, has supplemented EasyTech with other activities, such as a movie festival, a Family Tech Night, and teaching students Microsoft PowerPoint "to create everything from book reports to multimedia presentations on dolphins, volcanoes, and sports."
Recently he's been teaching his students about intellectual property. They made one-minute autobiographical videos and wanted to spruce them up with music. So Larson explained how to get permission to "borrow" the songs. That's real-life application, so students know how to use what they learned after they leave school. After all, says Larson, "the biggest focus is empowering the kids."
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