Name of  Project/Technology Used: E-Board

Name of Intern: Lisa Chatelain

School Name and Location: Bridgedale Elementary School, Metairie, Lousiana

Describe the Success Story:

My success story involves setting up an E-board for the teachers at the school.  Bridgedale is an International Baccalaureate Programme school, whose “philosophy is a commitment to structured inquiry as the leading vehicle for learning.”

The administration at Bridgedale created a chart with labels of grades and subjects they would cover.  The cells in the charts were then what each individual grade would uniquely teach.  They put up posters around the school, and I was asked by the principal to put this up on the website.

At first, we figured we would put the chart up on the website, just writing it in a programming language, but then the idea of using the school E-board was brought up.  Not many teachers used the E-board, so this was the perfect way for them to get involved, and to show them how simple it really is.

Each grade has their own tab.  Under each tab I added a note with the title of the “subject” that was consistent for all grades, plus the subtitle unique to each grade.  For example, the first note under Kindergarten is titled “Who We Are: HELLO IT’S ME!”, whereas First grade’s first note is titled “Who We Are: COMMUNITIES”.  The subject of Who We Are is spread across for everyone, whereas each grade covers a different part of that subject.

When a note is clicked upon, the details of the subject are stated in bullet form.  I also wrote this part in.  Also, the idea was to have pictures and documents added to each note at the discretion of the teachers.

The idea of the E-board is two-fold.

For one, teachers can ease into using the internet by using an easy template to upload and update students’ successes.  After clicking on the link to the E-board from the school website, they click the “post/edit mode” link on the upper right corner of the E-board.  After entering in the school’s specific password, they can go to their grade’s tab and choose what they want to do from there.  Options are such as adding, editing, or deleting a note.  Since I already added their notes and put in the text, the idea was for the teacher to add pictures or documents of the student’s work or them working on a project.  This can be done with the picture or document attachment feature, browsing their computer.  Captions are allowed, as are comments to the note from parents, which can be set to be monitored.  Also, whichever note they updated recently can be set to a different background color, to bring attention to the new documents or pictures.  An idea was to highlight a few students at a time, instead of putting up 25 students’ work at the same time.

The second benefit to using the E-board is for parents to be informed of what their children are learning.  It is simple for the parents to use the E-board as well.  After clicking the link from the school website to the E-board, they just click on their child’s grade.  They can either check out the differently colored note with new updated information, or look at older documents.  It gets the community/parents involved in their child’s academic life, and lets the student show off their talents to the parents.  It is always fun to be the one that is highlighted, even if just for a day.

How did this activity/project benefit the teachers, students and the school?

The teachers were enthusiastic about using the E-board in the beginning, but many factors got in the way of finishing it.  LEAP and grade level testing, and then spring break put off the project until next year.  Hopefully, we will have a few teachers that stand out and wish to participate, making the other teachers see how effective it is, and how much the parents and students enjoy it.