Rotary learns about One-to-One, announces Galion local chosen for GSE

By Matt Echelberry

Inquirer Reporter

Galion Rotary Club heard about the One-to-One Tech­nol­ogy pro­gram dur­ing its Oct. 10 meet­ing. The guest speaker was Dr. Kathy Jen­ney, super­in­ten­dent for Galion City Schools.

Jen­ney said the admin­is­tra­tion started look­ing into tech­nol­ogy pos­si­bil­i­ties two years ago by vis­it­ing other schools and attend­ing sem­i­nars. GCS did a pilot pro­gram last year in which sev­enth graders got lap­tops. Jen­ney said the pilot was very suc­cess­ful and, over the last few months, she and her staff worked to ini­ti­ate a district-wide program.

This school year, stu­dents in grades six through nine have received Mac Air lap­tops. Ear­lier this week, iPads were pre­sented to Inter­me­di­ate School stu­dents. The goal was to pur­chase one device for every child in the district.

While it may have been a con­sid­er­able goal, Jen­ney was con­fi­dent in the deci­sion to imple­ment the pro­gram. “I believe it will fun­da­men­tally change edu­ca­tion,” she commented.

She fur­ther explained that stu­dents get to be cre­ative on how they present their work—whether they uti­lize pro­grams on their devices or turn in tra­di­tional papers. One-to-One will also bet­ter pre­pare them for an evolv­ing job market.

In terms of other advan­tages, text books have been going dig­i­tal for the last sev­eral years, so allow­ing stu­dents more access to devices means the dis­trict can save money by pur­chas­ing dig­i­tal ver­sions of books (which are usu­ally cheaper). Also, some stu­dents come from low-income fam­i­lies and can be dis­ad­van­taged because they have no access to tech­nol­ogy at home.

Stu­dents are taught how to han­dle and care for the devices. Tak­ing them home on evenings and week­ends is optional but extra fees are involved, such as the pur­chase of a car­ry­ing case and insurance.

All of the lap­tops and iPads have a track­ing sys­tem and con­tent fil­ter. Also, tech­nol­ogy staff can add or remove con­tent from a cen­tral server.

Jen­ney said they chose Apple prod­ucts because of the edu­ca­tional sup­port options that the com­pany offers. One-to-One was funded through grant money, but mostly using the money that would have been used on a new bus main­te­nance garage.

Jen­ney also empha­sized that a pro­gram like this does not replace teach­ers, they just need to let go of some of the con­trol that they have tra­di­tion­ally had. Accord­ing to her, the pos­si­bil­i­ties for the pro­gram are end­less, as kids are nat­u­rally intrigued by technology.

In club busi­ness, Pres­i­dent Dave Halsey announced that Dustin Fox, direc­tor of Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment for his family’s local busi­ness, was selected for the Rotary Dis­trict 6600 Group Study Exchange. GSE is a cul­tural and voca­tional exchange pro­gram for young busi­ness professionals.

Fox is an alum­nus of Galion High School, where he was a two-time state cham­pion in wrestling. He went on to North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity in Chicago and was the 2009 Big Ten and NCAA heavy­weight champion.

Now Fox will be vis­it­ing India in Jan­u­ary of 2013 with five other team mem­bers for the Ohio dis­trict. Rotary Inter­na­tional pays for the travel so that these indi­vid­u­als will be able to tour cities and learn more about the cul­ture for four weeks.

Rotary dic­tio­nar­ies were passed out to third-graders recently. The club received a request from St. Bernard’s for a dona­tion; stu­dents in grades five through seven do not cur­rently have dictionaries.

Club mem­ber Den­nis Tram­mel sug­gested donat­ing some hard bound dic­tio­nar­ies to the school for the library because the newest edi­tion there is from 1968. This would hope­fully be cheaper than order­ing a dic­tio­nary for all of those stu­dents because the approx­i­mately 40 dic­tio­nar­ies needed would not be enough to get a dis­counted rate.

The club will be help­ing with Trick or Treat: Move Your Feet on Oct. 25 (in the Uptowne Dis­trict). Rotary Lead­er­ship Train­ing will be Nov. 3. Also, Halsey said Rotary will sign up for Bingo Nights at the Galion Inter­me­di­ate School soon.

Galion Rotary Club meets every Wednes­day at 5:30 p.m., at the Var­sity Grille. The Nov. 28 meet­ing is can­celled because it is the day before Thanksgiving.