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Better Readers at Hand: Devices give teachers fast, tailored strategies for improving skills By Herb Booth. Reprinted with permission from: The Lancaster and Duncanville school districts are among the first in the area to try a new hand-held computer system meant to improve early elementary school students' reading skills more quickly and efficiently. Mobile Classroom Assessment, or mCLASS® will also help teachers cope better with the Texas Primary Reading Inventory test, a reading diagnostic test for students in kindergarten through second grade. "This will give us real-time data to help the students," said Rhonda Lehman-Fraley, Lancaster ISD's reading coordinator, "It saves teachers time in organizing the data. You can take several students who are having similar problems and work with them at one time." Anita Givens, senior director for educational technology at the Texas Education Agency, said the state has learned that the computer aid saves teachers 20 to 30 minutes per student per teacher per district. Teachers enter data on which questions a student misses and correctly answers on an observation test. Wireless Generation software then suggests ways to correct students' reading problems. Until now, teachers had to manually evaluate and find solutions to students' reading problems. With the PDAs, those manual steps are eliminated. Of course, everything has to be entered into the computer, but officials said that once the rosters are fed into the network, the rest is easy. Fort Worth and Arlington districts already have mCLASS. Joann Dickerson, an instructional specialist at I.M. Terrell Elementary School in the Fort Worth district, said teachers love the system. "What used to take three days now takes one day," Ms. Dickerson said. "We just finished the second semester and had administered the [primary reading inventory]. You get immediate feedback on what your students' deficiencies are and how to cope with them. Then the system offers activities to do to bring your students up to where they need to be." Ms. Dickerson gave an example of how the system works. She said if students are having problems with blending word parts and segmenting sounds, they may not understand the concept because of how it's taught. One technique the new system recommends is to have the students listen carefully to the sounds the teacher makes. Then they are asked what word is created, Ms. Dickerson said. "The intervention activities aren't the only alternatives, though," she said. "You can research for other alternatives." Vera Brooks-Ray, the principal at I.M. Terrell Elementary, said the beauty of the system is the immediate feedback it offers. "It's been a great system so far," Dr. Brooks-Ray said. Hearing that is music to Larry Berger's ears. Mr. Berger is chief executive officer of New York City-based Wireless Generation. "By the spring, it'll be in a few hundred schools," Mr. Berger said. "We started doing the work with the [primary reading inventory] a little over a year ago. By all early indications, the system is working and teachers like it. Our mission is to give teachers the tools that save time and add useful information." Ms. Givens said that in addition to Wireless Generation, the Texas Education Agency also has worked with the Center for Academic Reading Skills at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. One reason school districts are jumping on the bandwagon early, Ms. Lehman-Fraley said, is the healthy subsidy the state offers to participate. Instead of the $13.50 per child the program would usually cost, the state subsidy cuts the per-child cost for the subscription to $6.50. Lancaster ISD's total cost this year is about $31,250 - however state grants or subsidies are paying for all of that. Duncanville ISD's cost will be about $50,000, said Lou Anne Northcutt, director of elementary education for the district. Technology employees were busy downloading information into the handheld computers this week so that teachers could use them as soon as their training is complete. Ms. Northcutt said she doesn't worry about teachers losing physical and emotional ties with their students. "It's still a one-on-one test. It's one teacher, one child," she said. "It just saves the teachers so much time." E-mail hbooth@dallasnews.com
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