Oakland is an urban district across the San Francisco Bay from San Francisco. Our district has many economically disadvantaged students, and at my school more than half the students qualify for free or reduced price lunches. My school has been designated as underperforming by the State of California, but our test scores have generally been on the rise for the past five years. Our students score mainly in the 40th to 50th percentile range.
Technology use and equipment is very uneven from class to class at our school. Some classrooms have a number of recycled PCs. My classroom has about a dozen iMacs purchased by various grants. Some of these are connected to the Internet.
I teach three groups of students. The first is an elective all-female technology class called "Techbridge", after the grant that funds it. These young women have a chance to learn technology without having to compete with young men. The class is partly sponsored by a National Science Foundation gender-equity grant, administered by the Chabot Space & Science Center, called Techbridge. Most of the schools involved in this project are running after-school clubs that meet every week or two. At our school, I was able to initiate an elective class that meets every day, which has proven to be so popular that this year we have expanded to two classes, one for beginners and another for more advanced students. I teach the advanced group, about half of whom took the class last year.
My second group is a math/science core for newcomers. These fifteen students are new immigrants from all over the globe Bosnia, Mexico, VietNam and Yemen. The curriculum I use with these students is hands-on, with a strong emphasis on language acquisition. My last class is composed mainly of sixth graders who are learning to create digital video science lessons, a variation of the Techbridge curriculum. Two of the students in this class are eighth graders who are hearing impaired.
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First published on Jun 14, 2006. Content last updated on Oct 10, 2006.
