Facilities: Inside the Walls & Beyond

Description & Analysis

Erin Shultz - FRIT 7331

Facilities and Resources: The facilities at George Washington Carver are tailored to fourth and fifth graders. The building was built 20 years ago as an elementary school. As the population has grown the school system decided to break up the schools by grades and not locations. The facilities are maintained by a staff custodians that keep the library clean. The media center is furnished with solid wood round and square tables with wooden shelves for the stacks. The circulation desk is located to the left of the main entrance. It is schools policy that there is always someone stationed there to help. Students can also check out their own books at one of the four self check out centers. These computers can also be used to search for books on topics or by the author. The media center has three sets of double doors that allow it to be accessed from each wing of the school and the outside. The doors to the outside stay locked because of security concerns. Teachers and students use the south set of interior door that lead to the main hallway. The other set of double door leads to another hallway that has been turned into a work room for the teachers. In the workroom there are two copy machines, an ellison machine and various type of office

supplies. The school also uses this space to store items for special events like the fall festival. At George Washington Carver there are three computer labs with 30 computers that are less than 5 years old. One of the labs is located in the media center and the other two are located in each grade level hallway. Each lab is equipped with a mobile smart board. The library also has 2 class sets of Turning Points systems and ipads that the teachers can check out for a week at a time. The ipad carts are equipped with wifi and connects to the school systems network. The ipads are not available for individual check out by students or teacher. (Sriratanakoul,Katie.personalcommunication,March3,2014)

Location: The school is located in the middle of a residential area but only has one road that runs in front of the school. There is no noise from road traffic but there is occasional noise from air traffic because of the schools proximity to Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah GA and Fort Stewart in HInesville, GA.

Scheduling and Services: The library has extra wide aisles and plenty of space for special needs students that might use wheelchairs. The overall learning environment is positive and encourages exploration of the stacks with an open flow and well organized space. The media Center is open from 7:45 am to 3:30pm. Students can come to the media center any time during the day to check in and out books independently. Or whole classes can come to the media center for lessons, research, or lab time. Parents and students can also access destiny, an online database of the book and ebooks available, through this webpage. Carver Media Center also runs the School store. School Store is open 8 am 3:10 pm The story sells tokens from 8 am until the bell rings. School store is open all day long and students can come to the media center to spend their tokens with teacher permission. Students usually come during their recess time or after completing their work. Carver News Network is the Morning news program. CNN is reported and operated by the 5th grade students. They do a live news report every school morning that is filmed in the media center backroom.

CNN News

Online at a Glance: The school system recently update its technology policy to include bring your own device or BYOD. Which does not affect most of the fourth and fifth graders at GWC. However, this change has over loaded the network and the wireless systems for the county. The school system is in the process of increasing the bandwidth and updating the websites to enable all the schools to have a greater access to online learning. The network has not been updated for over 10 years and is not capable of handling the increase in web traffic and the number of devices accessing the system each day. This has lead to a decrease in the ability to offer a virtual media centers . They also updated the websites that are blocked by allowing social networking sites like twitter and facebook for the high schools and youtube for every school. (Sriratanakoul,Katie. personalcommunication,March3,2014) Links to online learning used most often in the computer labs.
Classworks: K-8; Creation of Individual Learning Paths SLDS: PK-12; State Longitudinal Data System Study Island: 2-5; Individual lessons correlated to CCGPS Moby Max: K-12; Individualized instructional prescription based lesson Sum Dog: 1-5; Multiplayer games designed to improve math fact fluency Edmodo: 3-12; Teacher led interactive learning environment Galileo: 4-12; Georgia online library research database

MobyMax Hartcourt online Think Central EduPlace Accelerated Reader GMCS - media center destiny - online card catalogy

McGraw Hill Online Math Book (MyMath)

Online Assessments taken by the students: OAS: Online Assessment System from the State EOCT: State End of Course Test MAP: NWEA Measures of Academic Progress Schoolnet: School-based online test creation and tracking GRASP: Progress Monitoring System

Budget: Periodicals books and magazines $601.15- 4% Supplies $352 -2% Technology computers, ink $1684.42 12% Books/AV print, electronic,DVD $11762.56 82% Total amount $14,400.13 ($2486.96 on ebooks this year. 21% of my book budget is ebooks.) (Sriratanakoul,Katie.personalcommunication,March3,2014) Needs Improvement: Overall the facility has an open and inviting learning environment. The media specialist has done a great job organizing the media center in a way that encourage exploration and curiosity. There are a few things that need to be changed to improve the mood of the room. All the walls are beige and have very few pictures or poster. Adding brightly colored poster or paintings would make the space more visually interesting and inviting. Also, the room has window on one side that open to an atrium/outside. When the sun is shining the media center is bright but on cloudy days the room can be a dark. Better lighting should be added in the future. The floors are dark brown which also makes the space seem darker as well. Brightly colored rugs and a reading area with bean bags could also make the space more inviting. The virtual library space is not as up to date as the physical media space. The website is a single page with adequate information and links but it doesnt reflect the resource that are available. Parents and students use ebooks and tablets at home so the media center would benefit from investing in these technologies for school. Additions to the online resources would also improve the media centers virtual learning space. While there are many ebooks available a majority of these are non-fiction and only checked out by the staff. The school ipads are not in use because the technology specialist has not formated them with passwords for the students. This is a waste of resource that should be addressed immediately. The ipads would also serve as a great resource for learning collaboration between the media specialist and the teachers. The virtual learning space would also benefit from connecting the community to the students through possibly teacher blogs of media center blogs that could share activities and programs with the public.

References: George Washington Carver School. Retreived from http://gwces.bryan.k12.ga.us/?PageName=%27Library%27 Google Maps. Retreived from https://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&q=Dr.+George+Washington+Carver+E lementary+School&fb=1&gl=us&hq=george+washington+carver+elementary&h near=0x88fb0f1094ead343:0x94ed3d8d06c85a9,Richmond+Hill,+GA&cid=65262919 56255828459&ei=-XsYU5SpIce-kQf07oDgBg&ved=0CKUBEPwSMAo