
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 4, 1995                   TAG: 9506050012
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-17   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: MELISSA DeVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`YOU CAN DO EVERYTHING ON THE COMPUTERS'

A GROWING NUMBER of Montgomery County students are using computers to solve problems and learn more than they ever have before. And, guess what? They're having fun at the same time, ranking computers up there with baseball and pizza.

Thomas Ingram is 10 years old. He loves Tasmanian devils and reading. He likes drawing and baseball. But best of all, he likes playing on computers.

Every day before school starts, Thomas cranes his neck as he walks by the newly remodeled library at Bethel Elementary School on his way to his fourth-grade class. He wants to see if anyone's on the ``good computer.'' That's the one that can send and receive electronic mail (called e-mail), play neat video games and give demonstrations of animal sounds on a wildlife program.

If Thomas is lucky, he gets the multimedia computer first and plugs in disks that allow him to learn about wildlife, world history and famous people. But before long, a line has formed and Thomas has to relinquish the machine to his classmates.

Technology at small Bethel Elementary, situated off Tyler Avenue in Montgomery County, is not a problem. The problem is, there's not enough technology.

And children like Thomas, Josh Caldwell and Travis Honaker, three of the most enthusiastic computer users at the school, represent a trend in public education: technology is leading the way children learn.

``I think at one point in time, people looked at technology as a fad,'' said Bethel Elementary School Principal Jeff Perry. ``But that's because they didn't fully understand it. Technology will never replace what a classroom teacher does every day. But it's a tool that will certainly allow the teachers to do more.''

For example, the three boys and their classmates are researching the history of various countries. Their teacher, Pam Clements, gave them some of the information. She read to them from a book. And she even told the children to look in the encyclopedia for some information.

But the teacher took it a step further and had the fourth-graders look up information on the computer. By sending e-mail to people living in these countries, the children found pen pals and gathered unique information at the same time.

``They learn so much more with these,'' Clements said, sweeping her arm across the small library and pointing to half a dozen computers on child-size tables. ``They're getting firsthand information. They're not learning from a book, they're learning what's happening right now.''

And, they're having fun.

``On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I have baseball games, so that would be my favorite thing to do,'' Travis said. ``Then after that I'd have to say computers.''

Thomas ranked his three favorite things: ``Computers, then reading, then I'd put eating.''

And Josh Caldwell, uncovering what teachers have discovered to be the biggest strength of computers, said, ``I love math and reading, but I like computers best because you can do both. You can everything on the computers.''

Students at Auburn High and Middle School in Riner recently completed a pilot Hypercard class led by Curriculum Coordinator Heidi Bernard. Bernard said the students ``are not afraid of breaking the computers or intimidated by them,'' showing an uninhibited enthusiasm that will be the key to their success.

``Basically, all we knew we would learn was how to operate a certain Macintosh application,'' wrote 11-year-old David Strathy in an online newsletter published by the Blacksburg Electronic Village. ``We didn't know we'd learn to make sounds, create wacky animations and be a spider maneuvering through the World Wide Web, a treasure chest with golden memories you'll never lose.''

By the end of the six-week course, the 10 students in the class had learned all about animals by searching for information using the computer, then organizing it in computer-generated stacks called ``cards'' - thus the class name, Hypercard.

``No class I've ever taken in my lifetime even comes close to Hypercard, the class of the future,'' Strathy wrote.

Look on the World Wide Web for the following addresses to see what Montgomery County students are doing:

http://www.net:70/0/Village/Newsletters/May

http://pixel.cs.vt.edu/bernard/hypercar.html

http://www.bev.net/education/schools/chs/index.html

by CNB