Maureen Leiss – Fountain Green Elementary
At Fountain Green Elementary School, we are always striving to be up to date on technology and give our students opportunities to utilize technology. Our fifth grade students are the only grade level that has enough laptops to support a 1 to 1 ratio. Fourth grade students currently have enough for a 3 to 1 ratio, while K-3 students have 60 laptops to share across four grade levels. In the general education setting and in Unified Arts classes, students are actively involved in lessons and use programs and websites like Microsoft Whiteboard, It’s Learning, Padlet and PhET for interactive science simulations. These programs allow students to answer questions, create projects, and interact actively with the lesson. Currently, students share laptops in many learning situations. While the shared laptops are a great resource for students, they would be able to participate more actively if there was a laptop available for each individual student. We want every student to be fully engaged and have the opportunity to share their individual voice through technology. Unified arts is a great way for students to cultivate self-expression through music, art, physical education, and media that can be enhanced using technology. If we were to win prize money through the BGE Natural Gas Hero Safety Challenge, we would use that money to buy more laptops so that students have more opportunities to use laptops and online educational resources in both their general education classrooms and the Unified Arts classrooms.