Randall Carter Wins $10,000 in Follett Challenge

The media center in the library at Randall Carter Elementary School is perhaps the school’s epicenter of learning.

Computers, books, and audio books are available for students to use in school and at home. And more will be on the way thanks to Laura Healy.

Healy is the school's media specialist. The school won $10,000 from the Follett Challenge, a video contest sponsored by Follett, the leading school school textbook provider in the United States.

The contest is designed to give school librarians and educators a chance to win funds to purchase new technology to enhance the learning process for students. Click here to view the video Healy created.

The video was viewed by the most number of people, more than three times, than any other of the 120 that were entered.

“We have a lot of hands-on material here,” Healy said. “Students learn much more visually now and it’s nice to have materials that foster that way of learning.”

The media center not only utilizes computers, but offers students audio books called playaways, which contain an MP3 file of an unabridged reading of the book, and e-books for teachers to use in their classrooms.

Healy and her staff teach students about how to properly use the Internet to conduct research using Google. They also teach the students how not to bring up violent or inappropriate information online.

“Believe it or not, a lot of students want to use the books rather than look up the information online,” Healy said. “If you do a search on Google you get thousands of hits. We’re teaching the kids how to sift through that information.”

Healy also said teachers are using e-books more and more in their classrooms. If a teacher is giving a lesson about China, he or she can use an electronic atlas and bring up the entry on the country and display it for the entire class to see at once.

“I think it is important to show students as many different ways of getting the information as possible because when I was growing up, all this technology didn’t exist,” Healy said. “Now there’s a new classroom dynamic with how students learn and how they are taught. Teachers have more opportunities to find out what works best for a particular student.”