BACKGROUND

Arne Erisoty is a Shop Instructor at Fremont High School and was recently honored in the Ogden, Utah school district as Teacher of the Year. Arne teaches at Fremont, a three-year high school of grades 10-12, with 86 teachers and 1,900 students from inner-city, rural and middle-class neighborhoods. As the newest school in the district, Fremont is best known for piloting new programs, rubrics, and curriculum. Arne is licensed to teach automotive subjects as well as physical education, English as a Second Language, and five other subject areas. Currently, Arne is teaching entry-level and advanced automotive curriculum to 120 entry-level and 100 advanced students.

THE CHALLENGE

Always looking for ways to keep his students engaged and to reduce disciplinary problems, Arne was seeking a tool that would help students excel on their yearly state and national tests. Arne’s classes are NATEF (National Automotive Technicians Education Foundation) certified, and judges passed Fremont last fall on program assessment and equipment in their five-year certification cycle. The state core automotive objectives include units in safety, technical procedures, electrical, brakes, engine performance, steering and suspension, and generic passenger cars and light trucks. Arne had used rubrics for three years and had seen some improvements in how students tested in these areas. But when another teacher introduced Turning Technologies’ TurningPoint interactive PowerPoint® software in a faculty workshop in Spring of 2006, Arne knew he had found the performance tool he had been seeking. He knew that learning is 8 percent effective if it is aurally-based, 60 percent effective if visually-based, but 95 percent effective if it is kinesthetically-based. Turning Technologies gave him the right tool for delivering kinesthetic learning in his classrooms.

THE SOLUTION

By fall 2006, Arne had TurningPoint employed in his classrooms. However, introducing this technology to maximize retention was not without some work and planning. Arne elected to spend his Christmas holiday creating 300 interactive PowerPoint® slides, which he subsequently used along with ResponseCard® keypads over a week-and-a-half period to drill his students for the upcoming state and national assessments. Because there is a cost involved in taking the test, senior students earn the right to test based on their high performance ranking. Arne wanted to assure that the 26 testing slots were filled with students who were likely to perform well on the tests.

After using TurningPoint over such a protracted amount of time, Arne was astonished with the results. His entry-level students performed 20% higher than the state average. As for his advanced class, 24 of his 26 students passed the national exam … the highest in the state! From the students’ perspectives, they love TurningPoint, and showed unbridled excitement during the learning experience.

CONCLUSION

Arne says that audience response technology is helping to generate a paradigm shift in teaching. As for himself, Arne has plans to expand TurningPoint’s use in his teaching. Arne viewed this as an opportunity to change his whole curriculum — using TurningPoint at least once a week for pop quizzes and unit-end tests. He is confident that his students won’t mind, suspecting that they will embrace his new learning techniques.

Arne’s enthusiasm for the technology is at least equal to that of his students and the results he is achieving are impressive. He says, “Teachers are missing out on this new technology. It is a new way to teach. It keeps students enthused and engaged in the learning process.”

He adds, “If they see one demonstration of this technology, they will see its value for their classrooms. It’s going to change teaching.”

For more information about purchasing Turning Technologies’ audience response systems for your organization, contact us at 866-746-3015.