New technology donated to Union County Public Schools by IBM is helping to build stronger readers and a stronger communication bridge between the school system and Latino parents.
The technology, unveiled at East Elementary and Monroe Middle School Tuesday, January 22, 2008, involves two separate programs: Reading Companion and ¡TradúceloAhora! Automatic Translation Project.
“We’re really excited about this partnership with IBM,” said UCPS Superintendent Dr. Ed Davis. “If we want to have our students familiar with 21st Century technology, we certainly need to bring that into the classroom setting.”
The new technologies are being piloted at East Elementary and Monroe Middle schools, but the potential exists that they could be placed in other UCPS schools. “East and Monroe Middle are not our only schools with high concentrations of Latino students,” Davis said. “We would be more than happy to have this program in other schools.”
Reading Companion uses speech-recognition technology that “listens” to young readers speak and provides individualized feedback, enabling them to practice their pronunciation as they acquire fundamental reading skills.
Teachers can track their students’ progress, for example, on words that may not have been spoken correctly, and be kept informed by other statistical data. Teachers can access information that will help them focus on areas where the student may need additional help.
“At East Elementary, we are currently using Reading Companion with our third grade English language learners,” said Karen Anderson, principal. “The students love working with the program and future plans include expanding the use of the program to all beginning readers. "
This Web-based technology was developed by IBM research and aims to improve English literacy skills for all children. ¡TradúceloAhora!, meanwhile, automatically translates English text into Spanish and vice versa in web pages and emails and is designed to aid communication between the teachers and Spanish-speaking parents of students.
“Communication is the key to having parents as our partners,” Davis said. “Sometimes the language barrier with our Hispanic community can prohibit the kind of partnership we want to have with them. This program, which allows them to send and receive emails, translating them from one language to the other, is very helpful in creating that conduit that is so vital to that kind of partnership.”
The translation program has also made communication with Latino parents a little easier for school administrators. As 60 percent of East Elementary School’s population is Latino, principal Karen Anderson said everything that is sent home is in both English and Spanish. Rather than having to translate every item by her staff, the program automatically does that, making it much easier to do correspondence.
Forty-two percent of the student population at Monroe Middle School is Latino. “So this is extremely important to us as we’re trying to make a more literate community, not only with our students, but our parents,” said school principal Montrio Belton. “It’s a partnership between families, schools and the community. It’s important for all of us to work together.”
For those parents who do not have computers at home, Belton said the school’s doors are always open to the community in order to help them utilize this software.
The two Monroe schools were targeted for the IBM grants, with an estimated total value for both schools of $76,000, through the efforts of Waxhaw resident Kyle C. Hilligoss of IBM Global Engineering Solutions.
“With the growth and transformation issues in Union County, we hoped to bring assets from IBM to help address some of the changes in the classroom in terms of language requirements, for parents and teachers to be able to communicate,” he said.
“While we’re starting with Monroe Middle and East Elementary as the anchor schools, our hope is to see this grow to other schools in the district, promoting literacy with students on the elementary, middle and, if appropriate, high school levels,” Hilligoss added.
Anne C. McNeill, IBM Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, said IBM does a number of grants like these around the world, but she has especially enjoyed working with UCPS.
“What is most exciting about being part of the Union County Public Schools is how the school system has embraced the programs,” she said. “There’s such an eagerness to do as much as they can and work with the grant.”
McNeill said it’s a good feeling to know you’re helping the connection between the Latino community and the schools. “It’s rewarding to see those parents who have never communicated with their children’s teachers, now have the opportunity to have conversation with them. It’s exciting because they don’t have that barrier anymore.”
Esperanza Cruz and her husband, Javier Villafuerte, have an 11-year-old Laura Villafuerte, who is a sixth-grader at Monroe Middle. Neither parent speaks English. Esperanza said in the past she has been nervous about communicating with the school’s teachers and coming to the school.
“This is an opportunity for us as it enables us to communicate with the teacher,” she said through an interpreter. “It’s an opportunity for us to learn how to communicate with the school. We want to learn.”
The couple said their daughter taught them at home how to use the computer and they now use ¡TradúceloAhora! to email their daughter’s teachers. Javier said the program also helps he and his wife in their efforts to learn English.
¡TradúceloAhora! is based on IBM’s WebSphere translation technology. The grant program is in its fourth year and most recently 200 schools and nonprofit organizations received access to this technology, bringing to 350 the number of organizations participating in the program in the U.S. and Latin America.
Since 1994, IBM has been a leader in elementary and secondary school reform, investing $75 million worldwide. It has developed a series of high-impact technology tools, with the goal to introduce technology into school district operations that would result in improvements in student achievement.
Next month students from Monroe Middle will travel to IBM for a video conference with NASA and a session with IBMers about their jobs at IBM. If you are a teacher or administrator with Union County Public Schools and would like to learn more about these grant programs, email Kyle Hilligoss at kyle@us.ibm.com |
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