New School Year Brings Technology Upgrades to Catholic Consortium
The Catholic Consortium of Lake County will open its doors this school year with excitement in the air as students from preschool to fifth grade enter classrooms equipped with new laptop computers and expanded wireless networks. “Students at Santa Maria del Popolo (Mundelein), St. Mary of the Annunciation (Mundelein), and Transfiguration (Wauconda), will benefit from the enhanced technology in many ways”, according to Pat Strang, Principal of both Mundelein schools, “with technology leading to expanded reading programs, improved research and writing capabilities, and exciting applications in math and science. Our students will be well prepared for the technology demands of our sister school, Frassati Catholic Academy, and for high school, college, and beyond”.
Learning will become more mobile at the Catholic Consoritum schools, with the new computers housed in carts which can be easily transported from classroom to classroom. Jinny Jacobson, a fourth grade teacher at St. Mary of the Annunciation, is excited to “integrate the laptops into her life cycles unit on Monarch butterflies. Each student will have their own computer to research the migration route of the butterflies, track the weather conditions, and plot the temperatures on a graph.” Fourth and fifth grade students will have a chance to use the computers on a daily basis, preparing them for their transition to Frassati, which initiated a one to one student computing program four years ago.
The technology upgrades will enhance learning at all grade levels, even for the three and four year old preschool students. Tina Vakilynejad, Principal of Transfiguration, describes how the computers will provide a hands-on learning experience for early childhood learning, “by ¬allowing students in preschool and kindergarten to benefit from a variety of applications that reinforce skills such as letter/sound recognition, shapes/colors and pattern recognition. For all grades, the new computers will assist us in teaching math skills and will complement our unique, research-based curriculum which is focused on developing early skills for reading and writing.” For early learners, the new technology offers many opportunities to make learning fun.
The new laptop computers will also enrich the Consortium inquiry-based learning programs, which promote the type of learning our students will use throughout their lives – researching a project, writing a project paper, and presenting their findings, often with the use of the computer. The new computers will encourage students to integrate technology into their learning experience and make learning fun and relevant to the skills our students will need as they prepare for high school and college.
As a result of a $114,000.00 donation from a generous donor in California, the students enrolled in the Catholic Consortium schools will have an exciting year with new technology that will make learning more mobile and more fun. The laptop computers will enhance the excellent academic curriculum available at these schools and prepare students for high school, college and beyond.