Students, staff display tech savvy at HCS fair

Kindergarten and high school students were united in one cause Tuesday night as they showed off the flexibility and utility of technology in classrooms.

Neal Cardin

Central Hardin student Jacob Newton, center, takes a tennis ball Tuesday from "The Claw" as classmate Jacob Wooton controls the robot at the Hardin County Schools Technology Fair at Bluegrass Middle School.

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Neal Cardin

Creekside Elementary School students Landon Blair, left, and Hunter Satterfield look Tuesday at a website they helped create during the Hardin County Schools Technology Fair at Bluegrass Middle School.

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Neal Cardin

Radcliff Elementary School student Gabrielle Thomas follows a reading program using an iPad on Tuesday while visiting the North Park Elementary School booth at the Hardin County Schools Technology Fair in Bluegrass Middle School.

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Hardin County Schools hosted its third Technology Fair at Bluegrass Middle School. The fair is a showcase for the way teachers use technology in classrooms and projects students develop, such as robotics.

Tablets were featured heavily, as they have become increasingly incorporated into classrooms.

Susan Carson, a German teacher at John Hardin High School, was at the fair with a few students to show the TourWrist app, which gives panoramas of various sights throughout the world. Carson can show her students a cityscape of Berlin or a church in Munich. By scrolling the screen or twisting and turning the tablet, users can see a three-dimensional view.

The added dimension gives students a better understanding of the size and scope of buildings, Carson said. Sophomore Olivia Kohler said the app gives her an opportunity to see places she wouldn’t otherwise, and sophomore Austin Pittman said it was better than relying on “pictures from the ’80s” in textbooks.

“If you move around, it’s like you’re actually there,” Kohler said.

Tablets also have become a steady feature of Meg Wiersema’s class at North Park Elementary School. Her kindergarten students play games that tie into core content at individual centers.

“This is their world,” she said.

Not only does it teach students math or reading skills they need, she said, they become comfortable with the equipment.

“If you were a sub and you came in and you didn’t know how to work this, they would show you,” Wiersema said.

Second-grade teacher Rachel Will is using QR codes in her classroom at G.C. Burkhead Elementary School. The codes can be scanned using a reader, which displays information loaded into the code.

Will creates the codes to embed questions for students, which they collect using a reader app on an iPod Touch, she said. This makes for a more active way for students to answer questions than if they simply completed a worksheet.

Second-grader Kendall Ashlock said she thinks it’s a more fun way to do her assignments “because you get to go around and scan (the QR codes) instead of bubbling (the answers) in,” she said.

Kelly Cantrall can be reached at (270) 505-1747 or kcantrall@thenewsenterprise.com.