An educator with great tech plans finds she must start at the very beginning

Things are buzzing at the Monarch Library, where a class of 20 first graders is working intently on laptops. On screen, the current application is Big Universe, a picture-book site, where some kids are busy reading books, while others are browsing the program for their next title. No big deal. But to Keisa Williams, Monarch’s librarian, it’s simply “awesome.” Surveying the scene, she says, “There have been a few times when I’ve welled up at this.”

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Getty Images for SLJ.

The cool, composed Williams (pictured, above) comes by her emotions honestly. She and her students at Monarch Academy, a K–5 charter school in Oakland, CA, have worked hard to get to this point. Just four months ago, these same students couldn’t operate a mouse, much less log in to and operate a digital program. By February—as seems fitting by the second decade of the 21st century—the kids had become capable computer users, able to tackle a range of activities and the Web and ready for the next new thing their technologically adventurous librarian was waiting to throw at them. Helping these kids gain competency in an aspect of contemporary life that most people take for granted was “a journey,” as Williams calls it, and for the rest of us, an example of professional dedication, the resiliency of children, and their capacity to learn. Located in East Oakland, Monarch Academy serves an urban community—98 percent of the 352 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, 97 percent are English-language learners, and three percent are African American per official stats. About 50 percent of students have computers at home, estimates Williams, but not all of them have access to the Internet, and their parents’ tech experiences are probably pretty slim. As for cell phones—increasingly critical tools as more and more of our lives go mobile—Williams would be shocked if a single student had one. Still, Williams had no idea of the high hurdle she’d have to clear when she began the current school year. Fully versed in the latest 2.0 applications and networked, via Twitter, with fellow leaders on the cutting edge of education technology, the librarian was raring to go last fall. Armed with a slew of new project ideas—everything from blogging to digital story telling—Williams couldn’t wait for her students to finally get hands-on with technology. Now in her fourth year at the school, she had seen the media center’s equipment stash swell from a paltry six student computers to 30 laptops, thanks to Monarch’s founding principal, Tatiana Epanchin, who, before she left the school last year, shifted one of the school’s laptop carts to the library. In another windfall, Williams also received a Promethean interactive whiteboard, making Monarch’s the only library in the district to have one. But from the start, there was trouble. “I didn’t know until I put them in front of the computer. I assumed they knew what to do,” recalls Williams of what happened in the fall. “I assumed wrong.” The kids had obviously never handled a laptop computer, much less worked on one, as Williams, holding her breath, observed the youngsters’ awkward attempts to pull out and sit in their chairs, while at the same time balancing $1,000 laptops. Once they opened the computers—with the librarian’s help—the students struggled with the trackpad and couldn’t manage the mouse. Clicking was another foreign concept. “I’ve been using computers for years, and, frankly, it didn’t occur to me that we might spend so much time distinguishing among clicking behaviors,” says Williams of the resulting right-click-left-click and then there’s double-click conundrum. Another problem, of course, was that many younger students didn’t know their left from their right. This called for a radical change in plans. Setting aside her sophisticated tech plans, such as using tools like SpellingCity, a free Web program with a game-style learning interface, for vocabulary instruction, Williams devoted each of her 50-minute sessions to working on the basics. Lesson number one? Log in, log out—return the laptops to the cart. Later on students practiced maneuvering using a trackpad, click-and-drag, control/alt/delete, and other key combinations. (For more lesson details, see “What Works.”) Williams aired some of her frustration with keyboarding lessons on Twitter, which garnered a response from Ira Socol (@Irasocol), a special education technology scholar at Michigan State University’s College of Education. He suggested she reconsider traditional keyboarding, an outdated skill that doesn’t jibe with the varied, real-world methods of content entry, including texting via phone keyboards. Concerned as well about the potential for repetitive motion injuries, Williams looked into assistive technologies, but her budget wouldn’t accommodate purchasing alternative mice and other ergonomic equipment. She opted instead for what she calls a more organic way to familiarize students with text entry: the two-finger hunt-and-peck method. Things went very slowly. “As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t rush,” says Williams. But in a few months’ time, she witnessed the payoff—the kids were comfortable working on their laptops. “Click, scroll, drag,” says Williams, ticking off the moves, “no problem.” Plus, “no one is saying, 'Miss K, I don’t know what to do,’” she says, recalling the running around she would do from student to student, frantically saving their work. Evidence, perhaps, of a deeper achievement, Williams observes, “Now it’s to the point where they’re learning things that I’m not teaching.” One second grader, Paola, who had apparently been watching the librarian closely, figured out how to name a file and save it to the server. “She’s my little helper, now,” Williams says with pride. Monarch’s classroom teachers have also expanded their tech skills, with some encouragement from the librarian. “Keisa’s excitement and passion for integrating technology and media literacy into reading and writing lessons have changed the way I think about reading and writing,” says Siobhan Boylan, a fifth-grade teacher, who is teaming with the librarian on a digital storytelling project. “I’ve never been fond of textbook-type robo-teaching, but I also never thought deeply about having kids use the Internet as an authentic and dependable resource for learning about and exchanging ideas.” Meanwhile, Matt Meyer, a third-grade teacher, has set up a class wiki and signed up for a Delicious account, connecting with the librarian through the social bookmarking site. That’s not to say there haven’t been hiccups along the way. For instance, a risk of Web-based applications played out in one class, when someone’s little sister, playing on a home computer, messed with the talking aliens a class had created on free animation tool Voki. And Boylan has her own challenges, with half of her students reading below grade level and many struggling with the more abstract concepts of fifth-grade math. But for the kids who are behind, she says, “using technology really builds their confidence and feeling of being connected to other learners around the world. In some ways, it lends a purpose to their struggle to catch up in their studies.” For Williams, it will be a while, she says, before she comes full circle on her technology integration journey. While the kids are making great strides, she has decided to put off blogging, and her account on open-source course management system Moodle, little used, has gone dormant. But that’s fine by her. “It’s like building a house: you must begin with a strong foundation,” Williams says of her measured process for introducing technology. “We will eventually get there.”