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Show 'At risk' pilot program created for WX High 0 i ' Jpif'fW tmmmm i IMI III I - xsS" By KRIS JOHNSON Staff Writer WOODS CROSS A two-year pilot program for "at risk' students will be created at Woods Cross High School under a $20,000 Utah State Office of Education grant, biology teacher Roger F. Martin said Monday. Martin and fellow biology teacher Glen Orme, along with Lowell Oswald, an educational diagnostician, will use the funds to develop the program using technology to assist students with special needs. Expected to go into effect during the 1991-92 school curriculum, the program will be based on computers, science software and the newly emerging laser disc technology, Martin said. , The main focus of the biology software is the video laser disc, which turns the complex vocabulary of science into simple pictures. Instead of reading about how the heart pumps blood, students can use a computerized bar code that shows them in a colorful way how the blood flows through the heart. t The bar code represents the frame numbers on the laser videodiscs. Each frame is a picture. Every videodisc consists of a 108,000 frames of biological concepts such as plants or animals. The program user simply tells the computer what he wants to look at, and the software will produce that bar code. The program user can control the biological information by using the bar codes. Whatever frames are represented by the bar code, will appear on the television monitor. The Journal of Special Education indicates that "...a well-sequenced, highly structured approach to teaching background knowledge in a particular par-ticular content area can lead to successful learning of difficult material." Moreover, the journal indicates that the videodisc appears to be a robust medium for teaching content area knowledge to mildly handicapped high school students. Through the use of modem technology-based instruction, students can learn through multi-sensory stimulation. At-risk and mildly handicapped students have traditionally performed poorly in secondary science classes and this continual failure frequently results in placement in a resource class. Placing students with learning difficulties in "pull-out" programs for remedial instruction robs them of the many stimulating opportunities available for learning in regular science classes, said Martin. One of the main purposes of the pilot program is to enable students with learning problems to succeed in a class that has traditionally proven to be extremely difficult for them. Students will have positive experiences because the videodiscs have been specifically designed to enhance their learning process. Martin and his colleagues will use authoring software to track each student's progress through quizzes, tests, and work sheets. With the aid of the software, they will be able to tell students where to find information if they miss any given objective in the study guides, quizzes or tests. The pilot program will be developed around the State Core Curriculum. The biology software programs are also built around standard biology objectives. ob-jectives. At-risk students aren't the only ones who will benefit from this new program. pro-gram. All biology students will learn more by having access to the technology-based instructional material, said Martin. "We really do care about these students, we haven't had a way to help them outside of the classroom. So when this technology aspect came in, that's what drew us together getting pictures for the students to understand science," said Martin. The three teachers said they want the two-year pilot program to be successful enough so that other schools and districts will have a model to base similar programs on for themselves. A key visual aide Excited about winning the $20,000 Utah State Office of Education Reform Program Funding Grant they applied for last fall, Biology Instructors Glen Orme (left), Resource Teacher Lowell Oswald (center), and Biology Instructor Roger Martin practice using a laser disk at Woods Cross High School. The disk and disk player will allow the instructors instruc-tors to better demonstrate scientific principles to at-risk students at the school. |