Petaluma schools swapping textbooks for computers

Eighth-grade math classes began this fall in the Petaluma City Schools district with one dramatic change from years past: There was no textbook.

Instead, about 900 eighth-graders were given a slim laptop computer containing a digital math e-book.

The change is a test for the district, which has a goal of providing a laptop for every student in the coming years. It comes at a time when new state standards, called Common Core, are requiring students to be proficient in technology and take an annual assessment on computers, prompting districts around Sonoma County to expand their use of technology.

The change hasn’t been without growing pains, as districts struggle to provide adequate Internet access at school and make sure students are able to connect at home to access online, cloud-based educational materials. It also has raised a philosophical debate about the value of physical textbooks in the classroom and the role of technology.

In Petaluma, frustrations boiled over at a recent Board of Education meeting where parents, teachers and students raised concerns about the transition from books to computers.

Petaluma Junior High School math teacher Heidi Sager said in a later interview that the experience has been frustrating for her and other eighth-grade math teachers. At the start of school, students and teachers weren’t always able to access the course material because of an inconsistent Internet connection as the school adjusted to having so many children online at once, she said. And at first, there were only a few physical copies of the books to go around, requiring teachers to make photocopies if they didn’t want to rely on the Internet. Sager also said she felt the district hadn’t provided adequate training in how to use the laptops.

“I wish there could have been more forethought, more training at the beginning,” she said.

Petaluma Junior High Principal Renee Semik agreed there have been hitches, though she said she is excited about the program. Early on, she said, schools realized that some students lacked Internet access at home. The school provided those students with wireless Internet cards, but in some particularly rural areas, even those didn’t work, she said. At Petaluma Junior High School, about four or five students were left without home access. The school has provided those students with physical textbooks, she said.

She said the district was quick to respond to Internet problems at the school brought on by far more students using the system than ever before. The connection is more stable now, she said.

“It’s hard to be a leader. We’re kind of the pioneers,” she said. “Despite the obstacles and challenges, it’s working well, and it will get better.”

Casa Grande High School teacher-librarian Nathan Libecap said eyes are on the district to do a good job implementing the new technology after the recent passage of two bonds totaling about $90 million that will help pay for technology upgrades.

He said he saw a lot of potential benefits to eBooks, including the option to link to related videos and articles on the Internet. But, he said, they might not be appropriate for every age or class. He said the district needed to seek out the opinions of students and teachers about what would work best.

“The future is definitely here, and the more people that have a say in what happens, the better it’s going to be,” he said. “That should start with teachers at school sites talking to students about how they learn.”

Superintendent Steve Bolman described the rollout as a learning process.

“Obviously, it’s a pilot. I’m not going to say it’s not without typical pilot issues,” Bolman said. “But we haven’t taken anything away. We still have textbooks.”

He said the district provided two days of staff training for all eighth-grade teachers over the summer and is planning additional sessions, and that individual schools are providing training, too. He said exactly how much training is required is one of the things the district is trying to determine this year during the pilot program.

The change is driven by the switch to the new Common Core academic standards and is not unique to Petaluma, he said.

Currently, many school textbooks are not in line with the standards and must be replaced, and schools are looking at e-books as a sometimes cheaper and more flexible option, said county schools Superintendent Steve Herrington. Also driving the move to digital materials is the fact that Common Core calls for technological proficiency.

As a result, more and more districts in the county are moving toward a so-called 1-to-1 model, where each student is provided a personal computer on which to work, said Matt O’Donnell, technology innovations specialist at the Sonoma County Office of Education.

For instance, Piner-Olivet Union School District has already rolled out the model in certain grades, and others are looking to implement it in the next couple years, O’Donnell said.

In the Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District, each student at Technology Middle School and Technology High School has at least one personal computing device, Superintendent Robert Haley said. In some cases, the students have brought their own computers; in others, the district has provided them.

The district hasn’t fully moved to using e-books but is investigating such a transition, he said.

Petaluma City Schools has already tried the technology on a smaller scale: Petaluma Junior High School’s Sixth Grade Academy was created in 2011 with technology as a focus, and each student was given an iPad.

Semik, who took the reins at the junior high last summer, said the program was running smoothly by the time she arrived. The roughly 60 students in the Sixth Grade Academy spend portions of class on iPads, reading news articles, and other times they sit grouped around regular textbooks, analyzing the plot of a story. Rarely, she said, are the devices on for the whole class period.

The district applied some lessons learned from creating the academy to its rollout of Chromebook laptops in eighth-grade classrooms, she said. That included parent and student orientations to the devices.

The school’s approach to technology is a blended one, she said, where books still play a role and will continue to do so. Overall, she said, students seem excited about the move to using more technology.

“Seventh-graders are chomping at the bit,” she said. “They want to do it, too.”

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 or jamie.hansen@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jamiehansen.