Literacy with ICT

In one case, an eighth-grade language arts teacher wanted to create podcasts of poems her students wrote. "We set it up so they could type in their poems and put them in PowerPoint slides, with credits and animation. Then they would play it and record an Audacity sound clip using microphones, then attach the sound clip to the PowerPoint slide," Polen explained. "When they played the final product, it was the students reading the words of their poems as the slides scrolled through. There was a lot of learning on everyone's part for that one."

At Pittsburg High School, a 36-week Foundations for Technology course is on tap to allow students to use state-of-the-art computers, the Internet, Web design, desktop publishing, digital imaging and video editing, with a price tag of an estimated $300,000.