Vega Schools Keep Up with Technology
Greg Cunningham
Amarillo Globe News
October 1, 2001
VEGA, TX - Much like doctors scanning the medical journals to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field, the teachers and administrators at Vega Independent School District pride themselves on innovation in their teaching methods.
Margo Knox, principal of Vega Elementary School, said the district is always
looking for fresh approaches that will help them teach better.
"We're never stagnant," Knox said. "We listen to new approaches and we're always making every effort to use them when they are effective. Anything we can do to help our students, we're going to do it."
One of the more interesting innovations the school is trying out this year is called the Visagraph, which is helping teachers to break down the mechanics of reading and teach students who could never be taught before, Knox said.
The Visagraph tracks a student's eye movements while reading a passage, sending data to a computer that analyzes how a student reads. The system can determine if the eyes aren't moving in coordination or if they aren't tracking from line to line like they should.
The Visagraph can even determine how many times a student has to back up to reread a word and what percentage of a word the student can recognize in one glance, as well as basic measurements of reading speed and comprehension.
The raw data is helpful, but the true strength of the system comes when teachers are able to deconstruct the way a student has learned to read and rebuild it in the proper way, Knox said.
"It really is an amazing system," Knox said. "It recognizes reading problems that before we would have never known existed. You can help a student completely relearn the way they read."
Knox said the system demonstrated its power this year with a fifth-grade girl who had never been able to read above a first-grade level, despite the school's best efforts. Teachers tried every method they could think of to teach the girl, and her parents even took her to specialists to find out what was wrong, but nothing helped.
The girl's teachers' were baffled. She could comprehend just fine when words were read aloud to her, but she couldn't process them on her own.
"We were just at our wits' end," Knox said. "We didn't know what we could do, but we knew we weren't going to give up on her."
The mystery was solved when the girl was hooked up to the Visagraph and it was discovered that her eyes weren't moving properly over the page. Now, teachers have instituted a plan to train the girl how to read, and Knox said the girl is making excellent progress.
"That was pretty amazing, to take a student we had spent so much time with and solve the problem just like that," Knox said. "You have to wonder what would have happened to her if this technology hadn't come along."
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