January 2008 — News
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Web Technology Boosts Writing Performance at Alhambra USD
The MY Access! program is Web-based, so students can use it from home. For those Alhambra students that don't have Internet access at home, teachers help them identify other places for access, such as public libraries, the library media center, and the classroom itself after school.
Online Activities
Benafel also created a Web site called Community of Writers/Computers on Wheels, or COW2 (www.cow2.us) to fulfill the grant's school-community connection requirement and to ensure that writing became a priority for students district-wide.
Benafel made a short podcast for the site in which a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Alhambra's Garfield Elementary School, Denise Conseco, described her experiences with MY Access!. "The kids are competing with themselves to improve their grades," Conseco said. Through MY Access!, she can monitor student activity on the site in the evenings, watching as her students submit an essay over and over, tweaking it each time, in an effort to boost their scores.
MY Access! also supports multiple languages, which is beneficial at Alhambra, where 33 percent of the student population is learning English. The program has a multilingual tutoring and editing feedback feature so that teachers can adjust the product's settings based on students' English skills. It also allows teachers to return feedback in a student's native language, although the original papers must be written in English.
Read More:
- Alhambra Unified School District
- MY Access!
- Benafel's Project Cow2 (Community of Writers / Computers on Wheels)
- Enhancing Education Through Technology grant
READ MORE FEATURES AND CASE STUDIES
About the author: Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, CA.
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