A Tale of Four Schools : At Dalton, ‘You Don’t Just Listen to the Teacher, You Find It for Yourself’

When thoughtfully integrated into a curriculum, multimedia technology can be a powerful educational tool.

The elite Dalton School in Manhattan received a $3-million, three-year grant from the Tishman real estate family for computer education.

Dalton’s sixth-graders use advanced Apple Macintoshes to “excavate” objects from a simulated archeological site. Dubbed “Archaeotype,” the computer simulation grew out of a third-grade game in which students dig in a sandbox for objects and analyze them. On the computer, they drag a mouse to do the digging, find a full-color picture of the object and then weigh and measure it using special software tools.

“This is more fun,” said Daniel Ruch, a precocious 12-year-old. “You don’t just listen to the teacher; you find it for yourself.”

Dalton has shared the program with a school in Chula Vista, south of San Diego.

Even at Dalton, a big gap exists in evaluating the effectiveness of computers. Bill Waldman, director of the school’s technology program, said, “You can just tell by looking at the kids’ faces” that they are getting a lot out of Archaeotype and other computer programs. Still, the school is working to develop new assessment tools.