VINEMONT – Mandy Redding, technology teacher at Vinemont Middle School, has much more equipment at her disposal this school year thanks to purchases made by the VMS administration.
The technology department at VMS is becoming highly equipped to handle the pressure of teaching technology to tech-savvy students. The computer lab at VMS has been bolstered by purchases of a few brand new computers to allow for more students to utilize the lab at once.
Redding plans to teach the students skills centered around the Google interface.
“Our main goal this year,” Redding explained, “is to give the students Gmail skills; Google Drive skills, Google Doc skills.”
There are three different teams in the Computer Enrichment class, according to Redding. The yearbook team, the digital photography team and the newscast team. The yearbook team obviously takes care of the yearbook, while the digital photography team prepares and handles all of the photographs.
The newscast team, however, is completely separate. And while the newscast team, at the moment, is working on creating a quarterly school newspaper, thanks to two new video cameras, the newscast team will be starting a weekly school news show for VMS.
“We’ll be teaching them the video editing skills necessary,” says Redding. “That’s kind of our goal. But also, as a class, always at the top is Internet safety. And then the main goal, overall, is to learn how to use Google Drive and Google Docs.”
Next year the students will learn the Microsoft Office suite, but this year has plenty of challenges left in it for the kids.
Maddie Woods, an 8th grader, is excited about being able to speak to the whole school and to talk about what goes on with the students day-to-day.
“On Friday’s we’ll, like, do a recap of what happened the whole week,” Woods mentioned.
While Redding predicts the newscast team will only be 8-10 people, she says that many more will be assisting in multiple ways, such as moving equipment around, taking photographs, and helping with editing the videos.
Thanks to purchases made by the VMS administration, the curriculum of VMS continually develops, which enables teachers like Redding to instruct and prepare kids for the future using the most advanced means possible.
