NMS Teacher Proposes A Technological Barn-Raising

By Jeff White

Seventh grade science teacher Ken Royal knows that if you want something done, sometimes you have to do it yourself.

A veteran teacher who moved to the Newtown school system this year, Mr Royal’s class is characterized by a seamless application of technology into the curriculum. Now, he is hoping to launch what he calls a “technological barn raising,” recalling the days when neighbors gathered to help build or repair barns together. In this case, Mr Royal’s barn raising is calling for parents and the Newtown community to come together for a different purpose: to donate old 486 or faster computers that can be used by his students.

“Old 486 machines that are doorstops to businesses are gold to me and my students,” Mr Royal says.

Using the advances in Cytrix – a program that helps bring older computers up-to-date – that the district’s technology team is currently working on, Mr Royal hopes to “make these old machines sing again.”

The more computers he has in his classroom, Mr Royal says, the fewer students per computer. Currently, he estimates that there is a computer for every three students in his class. He would like to get that ratio down to two students for each computer.

Although his classroom is equipped with two state-of-the-art iMac computers, many of Mr Royal’s science students do their work on three revamped models that he had donated to his class. Almost every single aspect of his class is tied to the use of computers. On these old computers, students draft their magazine articles that Mr Royal, via a “sneaker drive” (carrying a floppy disk from one machine to another) transports onto the class’ home page.

Moreover, each of his students is currently in the process of creating a Web page, which will be linked to the class home page as soon as the student pages are completed. The old computers provide simple word processing capabilities that allow students to draft the copy for their pages.

Although he says his class will take as many computers as they can get, Mr Royal says he would be happy if they could have 12 revamped PCs in his classroom. In Brookfield, where he taught middle school science, Mr Royal performed a similar community outreach and received six computers for classroom use.

Mr Royal hopes to eventually take these used computers and add them to the school’s network, from which he currently operates his “director” laptop that provides Internet connection for the class.

“I’ve been asking around,” says Mr Royal of his project. He has written a detailed proposal and community help request that can be accessed at: www.newtown.k12.ct.us/~royalk/techbarn.htm.

“I never keep my mouth shut when it comes to kids,” he says. “The more machines we have, the better we could do [class projects].”