This year the Tegna Foundation awarded Banyan Community with $5,000 to advance some of the technology utilized by youth. These funds allowed us to purchase twenty new Chromebooks along with a storage cart. These new laptops have significantly enhanced the classroom technology experience for our enrolled youth. They’ve proven invaluable for various activities, such as learning to invest with the Stock Market Game, exploring high school options with the School Finder tool, completing job applications, and engaging in digital art with touchscreens using the Krita software program. The Chromebooks have facilitated efficient online research during lessons and enabled youth to ask questions more easily.
“Lessons with online research have become much easier to teach. Youth can more easily ask questions and the classroom environment is generally quieter than the computer lab was.”
-Bennett Riesgraf, Secondary Educator
Testing the Stock Market
The Stock Market Game allows youth to try their hand at investing. They enjoy tracking their progress with a little friendly competition.
Stretching our Creative Muscles
Drawing with Krita allows youth to create utilizing many different tools, textures, and colors. Youth can also view other works for inspiration.
At Banyan, we are excited about future opportunities for our youth with our new Chromebooks! An example of this will be having our educators guide youth through online career exploration using platforms like CollegeBoard this upcoming spring. We will also use the laptops to assist 8th-grade leaders in the MPS lottery sign-up and introduce coding lessons with Python or HTML.
The laptops provide flexibility for exploring recurring topics like career exploration and high school applications, as well as new areas such as coding, digital artwork, and online game-making. We are grateful for these new devices that help to open more educational doors for Banyan youth.