Athens, Ga. – A Gwinnett County middle school, along with a dozen others schools across Georgia, will be the focus of the third annual Capitol Tech event at the State Capitol Building in Atlanta on Jan. 23.
Five Forks Middle School teacher Jerry Paxton and four of his students, Lexi Atkins, Eli Jones, Joey Moore and Marc Sporn, will show Georgia legislators how they use technology in their robotics class. In the robotics class, students work in teams to design and program robots to perform certain tasks. The technology the students use allows them to apply and extend what they learn in their other classes – making those concepts and skills more relevant, and thus, more memorable for them.
Capitol Tech is held each year to show legislators the positive impact that technology funding is having on instruction in Georgia’s public schools. Capitol Tech is a collaborative effort between Georgia’s schools and the state’s 13 Educational Technology Training Centers (ETTC). The team from Five Forks Middle School in Lawrenceville, Ga., represents 15 school systems in northeast Georgia served by the ETTC based in the University of Georgia’s College of Education.
The UGA ETTC has a staff of 10 educational technology professionals working with school districts in northeast Georgia to improve and promote research-based methods of instruction with teachers. Their emphasis includes integration of multiple technologies to enrich the curriculum, promoting the use of technology to increase school productivity and improving distance learning to provide opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible.
