By Lauren Young
Staff Writer
As learning for students advances and diversifies with technology, so do the means of teaching. And when Cazenovia district students returned to school this week for the 2018-19 school year, they found some new technology-driven classrooms and equipment waiting for them.
Hoping to introduce a new, innovative way of learning with more hands-on, sensory-driven activities and new technologies, Cazenovia has added two new sensory classrooms and two new Fab Labs to the district.
According to Matt Erwin, director of facilities at the Cazenovia School District, creating two new sensory classrooms, one at Burton Street Elementary and another at the middle school was inspired from a trip taken by about a dozen district staff members to SUNY Cortland to see a sensory gym. Erwin said the district recognized the potential these spaces could hold and decided to experiment with the concept.
These colorful classrooms are intended to promote focus, participation and creativity by allowing students to use their senses in a more hands-on learning environment. These classrooms include smartboards, height-adjustable whiteboard flipper tables, an outdoor space for a “more flexible environment,” stackable chairs to allow for more space and a “cozy corner” with LED lights, he said.
These “cozy corners,” said District Occupational Therapist Nicole Russo, are especially useful for higher-need students who need to destress without leaving the classroom and or “just need the quiet space with a calming atmosphere for them to really hone in and focus,” she said.
“We just want to provide them with that safe space to calm down,” said Russo.
Russo, who helped with the implementation and design of the classroom, said she is excited for students to try out the space and explore its flexibility.
“It’s an awesome space, it turned out better than I ever could have imagined,” she said.
Teachers can sign out these sensory classrooms and bring their classes in to “engage in a more active classroom setting,” and can be especially useful for classes where special needs students are intermixed, potentially offering a better seating arrangement or different way of learning for those students, said Erwin.
Additionally, thanks to a grant from Sen. David J. Valesky and Assemblyman William Magee, Erwin said the district was granted three Clear Touch interactive displays, one at each school, with up to 20 points of touch. These displays allow teachers to display presentations, documents, show videos or use the internet. The displays also allow multiple students at a time to play math games, write, draw or engage in other educational activities together on one screen, or split into four quadrants.
New to the elementary and high school this year are Fab Labs, or fabrication laboratories, which are small-scale personal digital fabrication lab spaces for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)-centered learning, featuring stations from electronics to robotics.
Erwin said because new state science standards are being implemented starting at the elementary school, the district started with the elementary school space first.
An even larger Fab Lab has also been proposed for the high school — one that could be 4,000 square feet wide.
According to the district’s capital project plans, proposed for a corridor of “underutilized” open space between a set of business, technology and special education classrooms in the high school is the potential for a 4,000-square-foot flexible Fab Lab space, said Erwin. This space, he said, would help with overcrowding, the availability of technology and using less duplicate technology throughout the school.
