iLearn

Santa Fe Public Schools increase technology in the classroom

I’m standing in Nano Anaya’s fifth-grade class as he asks his kids to go get their iPads. Several flock to the teacher’s desk and pick out their assigned tablets from a white bin, located near another white bin that holds traditional hardback textbooks.

The students each go back to their seats and log into digital slideshow presentations Anaya assigned them the other day. Next, Anaya shifts to his smart board, a large projection touch screen that rests next to the whiteboard in the front of the classroom. He shows me the prowess of the screen by writing the letter "m" with his finger and then right-clicking the letter and changing it to bold text.

Now into his second year of teaching, Anaya is a big proponent of immersing kids into new technology in the classroom.

"It becomes more student-based learning," he says. "They're designing their projects rather than just writing them down on pencil and paper."

We're sitting inside Ramirez Thomas Elementary, one of the first Santa Fe public schools to implement a "one-to-one" policy through the districtwide Digital Learning Plan. The school is located on flatland tucked south of Agua Fría Village and just north of the intersection of Airport and Cerrillos roads on the city's Southside.

Within five years, every school in the district is supposed to be as digitally equipped as this one.

As I walk through Ramirez Thomas' narrow hallways on a tour with Principal Vanessa Romero, several things remind me of my time in elementary school. Teachers impose order on energetic kids by making them walk in single-file lines. Student assignments and projects from the year are taped in collages on the walls next to classroom doors.

We step into the fourth-grade class taught by Rebecca Casaus, where students are using iPads to research animals. Brianna, one of the students, is drawing a picture of an animal on a piece of paper, using an image that she found online on her iPad as a guide. I ask Brianna what she likes using more, the pencil and paper or the iPad.

"Pencil and paper more," she says. "'Cause if I did a mistake, I can erase it with a pencil."

Angel and Natalie, two other students in class, are seated next to each other, using their iPads to look up information about coral reefs.

"We're looking for polyps and what they do in the barrier reefs," Angel says.

"What do they do?" I ask.

"Well, we're still searching," he replies.

Casaus moves to her smart board. She mentions using the digital board to show images of King George and George Washington to the kids while teaching them about the Revolutionary War.

"When I was teaching without it, it was all centered around the whiteboard," she says, referring to the dry-erase mainstay of public schools across America that largely replaced green chalkboards. "And now we're all centered around this. And I can pull things up quickly. I can show them what I'm talking about instead of just talking about it."

Several teachers I talk to view the technology as another tool in organized learning. But it isn't all smooth sailing. Some balk at the cost and question whether the school district's plan is exposing kids to too much electronic media. Others wonder whether teachers are getting enough training to use it effectively. So far, they've gotten three full days of training this year.

Patricia Gay-Webb, a teacher at El Camino Real Academy, is a fan of the program. But she says she wishes the district would give teachers a few extra days to actually use the technology they learn about on a project to better understand it. Otherwise, there is a higher likelihood of teachers making time-costly technical mistakes in the classroom.

"We are doing it, but it's like trial-and-error," Gay-Webb says.

Many Santa Feans had not even heard about the school district's Digital Learning Plan, an effort to ensure that all 14,000 students have an assigned laptop computer or tablet to use, until a property tax to pay for it went into effect last spring.

In February 2014, the Santa Fe School Board narrowly approved the funding structure to pay for the plan, which increased property taxes to raise $55 million over the next five years. That translates to a $150 tax increase each year on homes worth $300,000. Rather than put the tax hike up to voters, as most bond initiatives and mill levies to pay for public schools are, the school board exercised the authority to impose it themselves after the district commissioned a poll finding a majority of respondents favored such a tax hike.

But by the time the hike went into effect, public backlash mounted against the district. Last month, the board held a special meeting to address the controversy with the public. Most of the people who attended were district employees in support of the plan.

School board member Steven Carrillo complained about the meeting's low turnout after the district heard so much criticism. Nevertheless, he explained that Santa Fe Public Schools, which consistently rank behind the state average in performance, "couldn't wait" for a public vote to update the school's technology.

"There was a lot of discussion on what other ways we could have done this," Carrillo explained at the meeting. "The only other way was to issue a separate bond, which would have taken a year or so to initiate, a year or so to vote on, and another eight or nine months to get the money. Which means that even at this point, we'd be waiting another year or two years to get any funding for technology."

I'm looking in on Ramirez Thomas for an afternoon to get a sense of what that money looks like in the classroom. There, the principal, four teachers and an administrator greet me in a conference room.

They emphasize how much kids like using digital tools more than standard low-tech fare. KC Dutcher, the school's dean of students, explains that kids are more motivated to work on assignments with tablets rather than pencils and papers.

"It engages them, expands what's possible in classroom so you're not limited to the resources in the classroom," Dutcher says. "Basically it's that it's visual, and it engages their brains and their bodies in a slightly different way."

Tech Test

Arguably the most controversial aspect of the technology plan is its use for standardized tests, particularly the PARCC assessment, which has to be taken on computers. An EJ Martinez teacher claims that the PCs her kids take the test on are only good for PARCC.

Indeed, most students in the Santa Fe Public Schools are taking the assessment on Chromebook laptops. Across New Mexico, it doesn’t look too different. Betty Patterson, president of the National Education Association of New Mexico, says a lot of public school technology upgrades are to comply with standardized tests.

“What we’re doing more in the state is putting more technology in the computer labs so they can take the test they need to,” Patterson says.

And the ways teachers are able to work with this are apparently limited, especially for the PARCC test.

“They’re not really training us on how to navigate the test, because we’re not supposed to know,” explains Grace Mayer, president of NEA’s Santa Fe chapter and an art teacher at DeVargas Middle School.

She’s referring to a statement that teachers in the district had to sign warning them that they could lose their license for viewing the actual PARCC test.

A part of me assumes these teachers have to still be giving out assignments that are supposed to be completed with pencil and paper. But I wonder how instructors are finding the balance between digital homework and traditional homework. None of Ramirez Thomas' teachers seem to abide by a strict plan; instead, they use their best judgment.

Adele Flores, the school's instructional coach, gives an example of an assignment that incorporates the old and the new technology. She recently worked with students on an air and water pollution project. First, kids wrote a five-paragraph essay on the topic by hand. Then, they used their iPads to make a Powerpoint presentation about the essay.

"We had to teach them to cut it down to bullets, because you can't type a paper in Powerpoint," she says.

Anaya also emphasizes the depth of the slideshow. He recently assigned his fifth-graders a procedural writing exercise, where they picked from different topics. Some got to write how to bake a cake; others got to write how to clean their bedroom.

One of his students shot and edited a video about how to make a paper airplane onto his Keynote presentation.

"Keep in mind these are 21st-century kids," Flores says. "And when they go to high school or college or the workplace, we might not even have paper books by then, the way it's going. This is what you have."

As I hear this, another thought goes through my head: Are our public schools really just preparing these kids to give Powerpoint presentations at a fluorescent-lit office 15 years from now? If so, it wouldn't be that much of a difference from what schools were trying to do in the past.

I think back to how technology was presented in the classroom in my time as a grade-schooler in the 1990s in St. Paul, Minnesota. Teachers wrote on transparency sheets that were projected onto the wall or a pull-down screen. Our digital technology was limited to computer lab class, where we played games like Kid Pix, 3D Pong and The Oregon Trail to pass the time. Once the World Wide Web came to class, we were taught how to surf the Internet.

I still remember the giddiness many of us experienced when a boy in my class wondered what would happen if he typed "www.sex.com" into his computer's Web browser. A group of us swarmed around his computer while our teacher sat obliviously in the front desk.

At Ramirez Thomas, it's apparently harder to get away with this kind of stuff.

"The district has the restrictions and locks on sites that they can and cannot visit," Romero says.

That means kids don't have the ability surf onto, say, the official website of South Park during class time, as I remember doing in sixth grade during class.

"If I wanted to go and listen to online radio, they even have it filtered where I can't do that," Anaya says.

Mandela International Magnet School is the only other traditional public school in Santa Fe currently equipped with one-to-one technology. There, seventh- and eighth-graders are each assigned a Macbook Pro. Before they get one, they go through a six-week course to earn a digital driver's license.

Though they're still subject to the school district's filter, students at Mandela get a little more leeway. In their digital driver's license course, they learn and are tested on the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship. If students later break any of the rules, they get three strikes before their license gets revoked, unless one of their violations is serious enough for immediate revocation.

One example of a serious violation is students taking their laptops home, which they're barred from doing. The same goes for iPads at Ramirez Thomas.

"As kids get older, it's about digital citizenship," says Mandela Principal Tony Gerlicz.

Sometimes, the district filters even prevent teachers from accessing educational websites for a lesson plan. Flores recalls the History Channel's website being blocked, despite her planning to use it for social studies lessons.

"A lot of sites that you think wouldn't be blocked are blocked," she says. "And sometimes you have to get special permission when you're in class."

That special permission consists of calling up support staff at the district building for help. But some kids still take chances to look at something they shouldn't be looking at—and some apparently still succeed.

"You have to be careful," says Georgia Roybal, a teacher at Nye Early Childhood Elementary School.

Previously, Roybal worked at Nava Elementary. She recalls something that went wrong with a substitute there last year.

"One kid with behavioral problems hacked into a porn site with the teacher's password," she says. "I think they took the hard drive out and replaced it. No one knows how he got the teacher's password."

It's a problem any adult should be aware of before giving kids unbridled Internet access. Santa Fe School Board member Lorraine Price learned this the hard way. When one of her grandsons would visit her from Albuquerque, Price says he'd stay up late into the night on her home computer.

"He'd be gone two days, and then I would get on my email triple-x teenage sex websites," she explained at a school board meeting last month.

At the same meeting, Price brought up another technology issue: How much is too much?

She explained how school offiicials for a different grandson took away an electronic device that he used "surreptitiously" in class. She added that this same grandson would often want to play his Nintendo DS, a handheld electronic gaming device, while watching TV.

"And I say one electronic device at a time," she said. "We have to be responsible."

School board member Maureen Cashmon also says she's concerned about how much time students are spending with devices at the schools.

"Just from my own perspective as a parent, we limit the amount of time the kids are exposed to electronic media as much as we can," says Cashmon, a former teacher herself. "Now that we're doing more [in the schools], I question how much electronic media we're exposing them to."

Recommendations from professionals for how much time children should spend using electronic devices haven't completely caught up with the times. In 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended a maximum of two hours of screen exposure a day for children. AAP updated this recommendation in 2013, acknowledging that "important positive and prosocial effects of media use should also be recognized."

Now, instead of endorsing a flat two-hour-a-day limit on all electronic media use, AAP recommends the same limit for "recreational" screen time.

At Ramirez Thomas, Romero emphasizes that the students are using their electronic devices productively. "Teachers are using technology in a purposeful way so kids know their task is to do research," she says.

One thing AAP hasn't wavered on is limiting electronic devices for the very young, particularly those ages 2 or younger. Likewise, the youngest children at Ramirez Thomas aren't completely exposed to electronic devices.

Romero says initially, the school considered giving all students a tablet before this school year started. Instead, they decided to give first- and second-graders a digital card that can plug into a tablet. And rather than give each kid a tablet, kids in first and second grade share a limited number of them.

At Mandela, which teaches to an older set of students, assignments naturally get more complex. On a recent school day, I observe seventh-graders pondering the importance of balance in society. Each student uses a Macbook to write their answers on a single Google Document, which is projected for all to see on the smart board.

"My family believes in kindness, which leads to balance if we work together," reads one.

After they write their answers, Nevada Benton, their teacher, begins a class discussion on the topic.

"The computers don't really affect our learning," Alondra Azurdia, one of Benton's students, tells me.

Last year as a student at Carlos Gilbert Elementary School, Azurdia says she used computers once a week in class, mainly for typing exercises and playing games. At Mandela, computers are used for most of her classwork. But she says she still likes paper and pencil a little bit more because at home, her Internet connection is a slow.

Lorenzo Johnson, another seventh-grader at Mandela, explains that the school prints out assignments on paper for the students who may have slow tech at home. He tells me that both mediums have their benefits.

"Sometimes it's easier to do on pen and paper because it helps you think [when you] actually, physically write," Johnson says. "But it's also helpful to be doing it on the computer because you have so many different features that you can add into your work."

Not all schools in Santa Fe are on the same technological footing. Just Ramirez Thomas and Mandela currently have "one-to-one" status, as well as the Engage Santa Fe program for returning dropouts.

Groupings of schools are planned to join that status each following school year, with all schools scheduled to come into one-to-one status by the 2018-19 academic year. Newer schools and ones that are currently being constructed were chosen to go one-to-one first.

"It's more efficient, if you're going to upgrade the wiring, to do it when you already have the walls open for construction," says Richard Bowman, the school district's chief accountability and strategy officer.

Bowman emphasizes that the district would prefer to get technology in every classroom today. "We're trying to move it as fast as we can, as well as we can," he says.

One teacher at EJ Martinez Elementary, who didn't want her name revealed, laments the behind-the-times status of her school compared to others. It's scheduled to get the one-to-one technology in 2017.

"We got the hand-me-down PCs from the high schools when the high schools went to Apple," she says.

Her classroom does have a smart board, which she says was installed at the beginning of the fall when school started. But she says she didn't get trained on how to use it until last month, more than halfway into the school year.

"I leaned a whiteboard on the smart board for two months because I needed to be able to write on a board," she says.

Bowman says the district gave teachers hands-on digital training for two full days just before the beginning of the school year and once again for one day last month. Using revenue from the new taxes, the district hired four digital learning coaches and seven tech support staffers to help with issues across the district. The coaches are tasked to give ongoing training to teachers.

As for old equipment, Bowman says it gets recycled to other schools, as long as it's still deemed useful. A school getting rid of 5-year-old equipment, for example, may give it to a school that still has 12-year-old computers. Some get thrown away.

"If you have a computer and you can't run the software program you need to run to do your job, then it's too old," Bowman says.

Given the fact that 27 schools in Santa Fe will be going one-to-one between now and 2019, the district may be disposing a lot of old equipment in the coming years.

Timeline for Digital
Learning Plan

2014-2015

  • (Has 1:1)
  • Ramirez Thomas
  • Engage Santa Fe
  • Mandela

2015-2016

  • El Camino Real
  • Nina Otero
  • Atalaya
  • Piñon
  • Kearny
  • Ortiz

2016-2017

  • Capshaw
  • De Vargas
  • Capital High School
  • Salazar
  • Nava
  • Larragoite
  • César Chávez

2017-2018

  • Santa Fe High School
  • Tesuque
  • Wood Gormley
  • Acequia Madre
  • EJ Martinez
  • Chaparral

2018-2019

  • Gonzales
  • Carlos Gilbert
  • Amy Biehl
  • Sweeney
  • Aspen
  • Eldorado
Letters to the Editor

Mail letters to PO Box 4910 Santa Fe, NM 87502 or email them to editor[at]sfreporter.com. Letters (no more than 200 words) should refer to specific articles in the Reporter. Letters will be edited for space and clarity.

We also welcome you to follow SFR on social media (on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) and comment there. You can also email specific staff members from our contact page.