District 108 teaches students Web design

By Sharon Woods Harris
Times staff writer

Eight-year-old Kayla Milam holds the small silver square like an egg.

The Pekin student knows how fragile this $400 to $450 piece of equipment is -- she uses a digital camera all the time. She takes pictures of animals at Creative Landscaping, the business owned by her parents, Dave and Louise Milam.

Nearby, Becky Hazen seems a little less secure with her delicate equipment. Becky has never used a camera, digital or otherwise.

"My mom thinks I'm too young," she said. "This is pretty neat."

The girls are part of a new program at Pekin's District 108 -- the After School Technology Club. Twelve students -- a first-, second- and third-grader from each school -- came in from Sunset, Willow, C.B. Smith and Dirksen schools to attend a training session at Washington Intermediate School Thursday. They'll come away from the program ready to show others how to make documents that can appear on the Internet.

Students of all ages are eligible to participate.

"The idea is to produce Web pages for the district to tell the community what we are doing in the schools," Technology Coordinator Brian Abeling said. "Who better to tell the parents what the students are doing than the kids themselves?"

The program has three phases -- the first is learning to use a digital camera. Students are taught to take pictures, edit for content and make them into a picture page. The students spent their training session taking pictures of their schools to serve as a tour of facilities on their Web sites.

The second phase involves the use of Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software, often used to create digital slide shows. Students in the session were taught how to take classmates' projects and prepare them for the Internet. Students will do the work in this step, but each page will be viewed and edited by a teacher before it goes public.

The third part of the training session is actually producing a document for the World Wide Web with Netscape publishing software. That computer file then is posted to a server so anyone on the Internet may see it.

Abeling said the district wanted to start small with three students from each school. Each of a school's participants will be trained in one of the above areas, then in turn will train others in the after-school technology activity.

The district outlined the use of technology in such activities as one of its goals for the year. This program is a response to that, Abeling said. District goals also called for use of the Internet to inform parents of school activities.

Last year, teachers were trained as Webmasters -- people who take care of documents on the Internet -- to help the students through the process. Teachers have already been developing Web pages for each of District 108's 10 schools.

C.B. Smith School Learning Center teacher Becky Bellrose is amazed at how students are taking to the training.

"Most of these kids can teach us," she said. "We can be working on something, trying to figure it out, and they say 'click on this and drag.' "

She said that, unlike adults, "Children have no fear. They rarely hesitate when it comes to things like this."

Bellrose said the program is an excellent way to help children become more technologically aware and personally responsible. It also teaches them teamwork and communication skills, she said.

"Those skills are as important as the technology itself," Bellrose said. "Technology is a tool to teach other things and better those skills."

Kayla, who started using the family camera at home when she was about 5, snapping photos of her 16 pets, loves the thought of using her hobby in school.

"I'm learning so I can teach kids that are coming into the first and second grade," she said. "That's really cool."