This is a comprehensive, urban high school where the student body speaks more than forty languages. Students come from a variety of neighborhoods, including historically working class, "landing zones" (both for first generation immigrants and also families priced out of their old neighborhoods), and the initial wave of gentrifying families. 68% of my projected students are of color. Two-thirds receive free and reduced price lunch, and many are first generation immigrants. Last year, 3% of my students had individualized education plans. This year, 10% will be special education students. A significant number of my kids will be the first students in their families to graduate high school and go on to college.
For 90% of students, my class is a first exposure to college level content.
On the whole, their STEM skills outpace their literacy skills. While working to expand their capacity to read and write at the college level, I also want to acknowledge their preexisting strengths, and give them the tools that they need to further develop their technical and math skills. I want this to be a profoundly positive experience that opens doors not only into the social sciences, but into STEM fields as well.
My Project
I have already secured twenty-four Chromebooks and a charging cart. However, I had a very limited budget to work with, so the machines are all refurbished basic models, save four. I do not yet have a sufficient number to offer one-to-one computing for most of my classes. I am enormously proud to have found these units, and they have the capacity to perform 70% of the activities that will occur in my classroom, but they do not have the computing power necessary to do the more demanding technical tasks of which my AP students are capable. I want more robust machines on hand to push my most advanced kids into working with Geographic Information Systems software. We will begin by exploring the more sophisticated features Google Earth, but eventually engage with other map-making software.
My students will explore distributions of people, resources, and cultures throughout the world guided by the AP curriculum.
However, they won't just be passive recipients of the required content; I want them to identify issues that they feel passionately about, and then distill and disseminate critical information by building their own virtual maps. I don't want them to be just map-readers, but map-makers. These Chromebooks will give them access to real Geographic Information Systems tools.
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