Principals to get hand-held computers

Using a combination of hand-held computers known as personal digital assistants and wireless Internet, administrators in the Columbia Public School District will be better prepared to manage students and work to improve the teaching at their schools.

Beginning in August, administrators at schools district-wide will get Dell brand Axim X51v hand-held computers to aid them in their work. Among the 125 people receiving the PDAs are principals, assistant principals and administrative assistants. The approved bid for all of the computers was $47,000, or $376 apiece.

One of the main uses of these computers will be to allow administrators to remotely access student information such as class schedules, parent phone numbers and attendance information. The administrators will be able to receive this information on their PDAs throughout the school building through wireless Internet.

“It’s an issue of monitoring buildings for safety and for making sure students are in the place that they need to be,” said Jacque Cowherd, deputy superintendent for administration.

Another of the technology’s applications is to help principals and assistant principals evaluate the teachers at their schools. Administrators already perform teacher evaluations but will use the PDAs in conjunction with a new process called classroom walk-through evaluations. Classroom walk-through evaluations last four minutes, as opposed to the full-length 50-minute teacher evaluation.

“Under the old process, tenured teachers had the benefit of (administrative feedback) on a three-year cycle and probationary teachers were analyzed once a year,” said Mary Laffey, the district’s assistant superintendent for human resources. “We’re hoping that now some teachers will be receiving feedback once a month.”

The computers will help achieve this increase in efficiency by giving administrators a checklist focusing on four key areas of a teacher’s performance. It will also allow them to compile reports more quickly, and their notes on a teacher’s performance with the class will be transferred from the hand-held computer to the school’s network, where the teacher can access and read them.

The hand-held computers have been ordered, but the school district’s Instructional and Information Technology Services, or IITS, is still finishing the templates for the teacher evaluations. Once that process is completed, IITS workers will still have to help integrate the hand-held computers into the operation of the schools.

“It will be our job to help principals learn how to use the PDAs, so that when they are hall monitoring and things like that, they can get the information on a student that they need,” said Martha Myers, assistant director of data services for the district.

Because Laffey works in the administration of the district, she will get a hand-held computer. She said it will have less tangible benefits as well.

“It allows me to be more focused on my job,” she said.