SMALL SCHOOL, BIG AMBITION

JAMES HOGG ELEMENTARY SCHOOL EMPHASIZES TECHNOLOGY

Principal Jairo Casco keeps no secrets from the Hogg Elementary School community.

Everyone at Hogg is an insider. Teachers, students and parents are all collaborators.

The school has only 26 teachers, one principal, an office manager and a data clerk. Enrollment is expected to reach about 300 students this year.

It’s a small school, and everyone is on the same page — literally, at times.

Thanks to a private technology grant received last year and funding from Dallas ISD, the school now has a Google Chromebook for every student in kindergarten through fifth grade. They use Google Classroom, where teachers, students and parents can access shared drives, documents and slides, so students can collaborate on projects even though they might be across the room or at home with a cold.

Because there is so much information available at our fingertips, it can be hard to teach children about plagiarism, educators say. But simply offering them creative and spatial ways to organize their ideas, such as using slides instead of text documents, eliminates the idea to plagiarize, they say.

“There’s no copy and pasting,” says Spanish reading teacher Minerva Faz. “They just start writing.”

The next step in this collaborative shift is “project-based learning,” where lessons are carried out across disciplines. For example, a fourth-grade module on politics grows out of the social studies realm and branches into language arts lessons, math problems and art projects.

“It’s bringing alive what you’re learning in the classroom,” Casco says.

Hogg teachers are introducing