Electronic Contact

For my electronic contact assignment I found a teacher in Cairo, Georgia who teaches 12th grade Economics classes and tenth grade World History. His name is Justin Amaro and he teaches at Cairo High School. He uses the computer lab for his remedial graduation classes and uses a program called USAtestprep.com to help his students prepare for the graduation exam and he finds it to be very successful. In his Economics classes he uses the same program to help prepare his students for their End-Of-Course-Test. This is a state issued test for all economic students. He also uses an interactive program called InvestSmart that emulates a stock portfolio. Its website is investsmart.coe.uga.edu. Here, he creates a class and his students compete to see who can make the most (or lose the least) amount of money over the course of the semester through buying and selling stocks. He uses powerPoint in most of his lessons

He also teaches a remediation class for kids who have failed Prealgebra. The school uses a program called OdysseyWare for this. Here, students can practice problems and get immediate feedback. Mr. Amaro feels this program has too many loopholes that students can find and it is not very effective. However, the test preps are very effective and adds to the success rate of his students.

I asked Mr. Amaro about how these programs are funded and he said that they have money earmarked in the budget for them. The programs I talked about are easy to subscribe to and use. The test preps would be easy to implement in a school that doesn't have much established provided they have a computer lab with internet access. The kids in his class love the games and practice questions and practice tests that allow them to become comfortable with the tests. The tests are very representative of the actual tests.

I think that I could use programs that would allow for test simulation in my classroom to help students with test anxiety. The practice would help lower the anxiety for better performance during the real thing. Programs would also benefit my students that are not into traditional classroom settings and get bored easily.