To get ready for Project iLearn this fall, Mount Airy City Schools teachers are undergoing more training.

The school system will start the project this fall in grades five through nine with students receiving iPod Touches and mobile laptop carts with MacBooks provided at the participating schools. According to Carrie Venable, instructional technology facilitator for the school system, the MacBooks will arrive first and then the iPod Touches. This will allow teachers to get the new school year under way before starting to integrate the new technology.

The teachers participating this year received their MacBooks and iPod Touches in the spring and have already had some training in using them. They have also been able to keep them over the summer in order to become more comfortable. Over the next several days, the teachers will participate in a two-day final training session before school begins. They are learning to integrate the technology into their lesson plans by becoming more comfortable with it and looking at lesson plans that others have already created.

Dianne Lawrence, an Apple representative, is leading the training sessions which will culminate in the teachers each creating a lesson and sharing it with the other attendees as well as posting it on a blog.

“The simple fact is you’re never really fully ready. The kids are automatically comfortable with it but I think the teachers are more comfortable than they were in the first training,” said Venable. “We just want to lay out the process for them.”

The teachers are taking advantage of the training sessions to learn more about everything they can do with the new technology and to become more comfortable with it.

“It’s helped me know how to incorporate the iPod into the classroom by being able to navigate it ourselves,” said Abby Gallimore, sixth grade inclusion teacher at Mount Airy Middle School. “We’ve gotten Web sites to be able to actually send the students to and we’ve learned how to make the technology more user-friendly.”

“Hopefully we can use some of these apps and find some good research materials for our kids to use like exam reviews and games we can use to kind of trick students into learning. They think they’re just playing but they’re actually learning the material,” said Olivia Bolen, math teacher at Mount Airy High School. “We’ve talked about wikis a little bit and how we can have a Web page and add to it and have students have discussions on it. We’re getting a lot of good stuff in here.”

The teachers also think the students will be excited with the improvements in technology. Many of them already have laptops or iPods and so are familiar with them.

“It’s hands-on engagement,” said Bolen of the iPod Touches. “That’s what gets their attention these days.”

“The kids are going to be more engaged. They’ll be more in tune with something they use every day. They’ll also learn they can use it for research,” said Gallimore.

In addition to this training session and one in the spring when they first got the equipment, teachers were able to participate in a MacBook for beginners seminar taught by Venable and a Garage Band training seminar by Levi Goins.

Contact Morgan Wall at mwall@mtairynews.com or 719-1929.