Computer software to help pupils do better

By ED RUNYAN

VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF

HOWLAND — There are kids in every school that tend to become easily demoralized by their inability to learn.

Instead of asking questions to clarify, they turn inward and assume they can’t learn because of a lack of ability.

This year, some of the teachers in Howland schools will be using software developed by Turning Technologies, a nationally recognized Youngstown company, to help such kids do better.

But it will do a lot more than that, school officials say.

The school district was awarded a $47,000 grant by the Regional Chamber to allow it to continue its work with a concept called “short-cycle assessment,” the ability to check on the progress of pupils at relatively short intervals.

The school used these assessments with one particular group of pupils last year who were underachieving in math, and their scores rose 22 percent.

But the assessments were done with paper and pencil, and such tests take lots of time, said Louise Cassagrande, the district’s director of curriculum.

What Cassagrande hoped to find with the Regional Chamber’s money was a way to use new audience response technology to test pupil progress electronically.

Cassagrande said it is a testament to the superior quality of Turning Technologies’ formative assessment program called TurningPoint that she did not know about when she was comparing products.

Only after deciding on TurningPoint did she talk to a representative and discover that it was a local company.

Inc. Magazine recently ranked Turning Technologies as the fastest-growing privately held software company in the nation, and the 18th-fastest-growing privately held company overall. TurningPoint software is Turning Technologies’ flagship product. It is used in educational and business settings.

Training session

Cassagrande and Donna Jackson, the representative from Wicklifffe-based Assessment Technologies who came to Howland High School to demonstrate the product to them Friday, agreed that TurningPoint will help kids who generally don’t speak up in class.

“Those kids that would normally be leery about answering questions during a class — their participation goes way up [when TurningPoint is used],” Cassagrande told the teachers during their training.

“And the person who always raises their hand becomes more quiet,” Jackson added.

The concept works by giving each pupil a ResponseCard keypad with about a dozen buttons. A single computer in the classroom sends images to a projector and a projection screen. The teacher asks the pupils questions to test their knowledge, and the pupils respond on the keypad.

The results are sent back to the computer by radio frequency, calculated and preserved instantly, and presented in the PowerPoint program on the overhead screen. There are many uses for the information after that, but the main one is the ability to quickly see how well pupils have learned the material.

“It will make your time more efficient and make you more productive,” Jackson told the teachers.

About 50 of the district’s 220 teachers will be using the tool in this school year.

The teachers are from a group who have worked on a high-performance learning project in the past. They represent a broad class of subjects and learning abilities — from gifted to special education and from the lowest to highest grades in the district, Cassagrande said.

If the program proves helpful, it may eventually be extended to every classroom in the district, she added.

runyan@vindy.com