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Summer Activities at the Center

The Center was abuzz with activity throughout the summer of 2000.

• Small Business Training
• Libraries of Medicine Training
• Mathematics Project
• Students at the Center
• Lusher Alternative Elementary School
• Benjamin Franklin Elementary School
• Personal Financial Literacy Institute

Small Business Training

The Economic Development Center along with the Small Business Administration conducted training in July for small disadvantaged businesses. The training is part of an annual conference that provides business development assistance to certified Section 8(a) small disadvantaged businesses. The training sessions covered such areas as: procurement/contracting assistance, administrative management, financial/accounting management, marketing assistance, changes in the 8(a) program, and joint venture and teaming agreements.

Libraries of Medicine Training

Barbara Cosart, Consumer Health Coordinator for the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM), conducted a daylong training session in August for Library faculty and staff. The mission of NNLM is to advance the progress of medicine and to improve public health by providing equal access to biomedical information to health professionals and to improve the public's access to health information. Ms. Cosart provided training for the National Library of Medicine's online databases that will enable Xavier's Library to assist students, faculty, staff, and the larger community in accessing health information. Kytara Gaudin and Yvonne Hull were co-chairs of the workshop.

Area teachers and students involved in Mathematics project

Dr. Paul McCreary (Mathematics) worked with high school students and mathematics teachers from the New Orleans area. The teachers and students were from three public schools and one private school. The teachers included Ronda Baudy Moore (Frederick Douglas High), Merlin Magee (McDonogh #35 Senior High), Frank Sparks (Warren Easton High), and Ann Lupe (Xavier Preparatory School).

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Each teacher assisted a student selected from the respective schools in a project that involved the use of Mathematica software and the accompanying graphical interface designed by Dr. McCreary. This collaboration will continue throughout the upcoming academic year and include the use of the WebBoard as a way of documenting the "group memory."

Students at the Center

Xavier University, through its Division of Education and Center for the Advancement of Teaching, has provided space and time for seven public school students to write a website design document. The website will feature New Orleans heroes in the struggle for social justice for people of color.

The students are members of the Students at the Center Program (SAC), a school-based writing course at eight public schools. Each student devoted 60 hours of time to jump-start the project. The students were Robin Thornton (Thurgood Marshall Middle School), Juan Hernandez and Quarrance Claiborne (Fredrick Douglass High School), Leslie Wood (John McDonogh High School), and Adriane Frazier, Towanna Pierre, and Ashley Jones (McDonogh #35 Senior High).

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SAC Co-directors, Mr. Jim Randels and Miss Lisa Richardson, also helped the students write the blueprint for this website. The website is intended to inspire young people to improve their city as they learn its history. It will consist of in-depth articles on specific events and people of New Orleans' past, as well as biographies on many of New Orleans' existing activists and heroes. The site will also feature creative pieces and essays by students from all SAC schools in the SAC network. An art gallery and links to other sites about social justice, the culture and history of New Orleans, and the Students at the Center Program will round out the site.

Lusher Alternative Elementary School

The Center provided a workshop for Lusher school teachers on August 16, which introduced them to the history of the Internet and World Wide Web, and provided a tutorial for navigating the Web and an opportunity to examine curriculum-building websites. The Center will host additional workshops during the 2000-2001 academic year. Center staff are also assisting teachers and parents from Lusher in their effort to develop an extensive school website.

Benjamin Franklin Elementary School

This summer a group of third and fourth grade teachers and the technology lead teacher from Ben Franklin Elementary worked in collaboration with Elizabeth Rhodes and Bart Everson to write a design document for the Gumbo LALA project website.

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What is Gumbo LALA you ask? Gumbo LALA is a project funded by a Preparing Tomorrows Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) grant awarded to Xavier University's Division of Education. The project aims to involve students and teachers at Ben Franklin Elementary in New Orleans and 6^th Avenue Elementary in Los Angeles, CA in the use of classroom technology as a tool for learning. The theme and focus of the project is the uniqueness of our local communities, specifically as it relates to Creole culture. Under the topics of food, celebrations, traditions, people, places, art, and folklore, the two schools will investigate similarities and differences in their communities and share their findings via the website. It is expected that both teachers and students will become proficient users of Hyperstudio, the World Wide Web, digital cameras, Web boards, and many other technology tools. Through the Internet and the website, it is hoped that an on-line community between the two schools will evolve.

In addition to developing a design document with explicit content that mapped out the entire project for the coming year, the teachers have learned how to operate a digital camera and use the Internet, WebBoard, and Inspiration and Hyperstudio applications.

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To work in a professional environment and have time to plan for the Gumbo LALA project has been a meaningful experience for these teachers. The concepts and skills these teachers have learned through this project will increase technology use in the classroom and the entire school, long past the completion of the Gumbo LALA project. In this way, the project will touch thousands of students in the years to come. The Ben Franklin teachers who worked in the Center this summer are Kotch Bergman, Susan Cutillo, Lisa Gilbert, and Martha Gilliam.

Personal Financial Literacy Institute

The Center for the Advancement of Teaching was the venue for a two-day workshop on Personal Finance for approximately twenty K-12 teachers from public school systems in and around the New Orleans area. The workshop was part of the Personal Financial Literacy Summer Institute, a statewide partnership of the Louisiana Department of Education, the Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, and the Louisiana Council for Economic Education. The National Council on Economic Education provided instructional materials for the workshop.

Topics discussed range from strategies on teaching the importance of saving, paying off a home loan, to managing a retirement plan. Also on the workshop's agenda was the use of applying graphing calculators to problems in personal finance. Use of the Center's Teaching Laboratory offered participants easy access to websites provided by the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc., and Investor Protection Trust.

This workshop was part of a continuing collaboration for the improvement of Economic Education between the Louisiana Council on Economic Education, Xavier's Center for Economic Education, and Xavier's Center for the Advancement of Teaching. Future workshops will feature instruction of the use of the Stock Market Game and integrating economic theory in K-12 mathematics and social studies classes. For additional information call 485-5042.

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