The Pick Elementary School students and staff members have channeled their inner Taylor Swift to enter a contest that could award them $60,000 for the school's technology infrastructure.
They entered the Compass Learning Classroom Refresh contest by making a video to the Taylor Swift Song "Shake it Off," but they changed the lyrics to fit their theme, "I Need Technology."
Shelley Patterson, enrichment specialist at Pick Elementary, said she had the idea from how technology inspires kids.
"I just had a flashback of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," like, 'Oh they're so bored and how much progress we've made in the 21st century, in 2014,'" Patterson said. "What would life be like if we had kind of interjected into old traditional classrooms, how would the mood or the passion of the children transform."
Some of the faculty and students at Pick Elementary helped make the video. The ultimate goal is to win the technology package for their school.
"With that comes 25 Google Chromebooks, access to SmartBoard and access to several of their programs," said Debbie Brooks, principal at Pick Elementary.
To make the video the students had access to a green screen app, iMovie and Garageband, according to Deana Schnuelle, media specialist at Pick Elementary.
"We have a few apps that we taught our students," Schnuelle said. "We had a little technology camp for our students."
Schnuelle plays the role of the tech teacher in the clip. The children come into her room and go from being bored to excited and become engaged in the classroom.
"Eventually this technology teacher gets the traditional teachers on board, and that's why at the end you see everyone dancing because the excitement has just ignited the whole entire faculty," Patterson said.
Patterson not only came up with the theme, but she said she wrote the lyrics to the song as well. She said she used a rhyming dictionary to help with the lyrics.
"She was thinking about the Taylor Swift song at night when she was taking a shower and she came back the next day and she said, 'I think I've got it,'" Schnuelle said. "I was like, 'OK, well, you write it and then we'll start going from there.'"
Patterson said the most meaningful part is how involved and excited the children have been about the contest. Each day they check the votes to see how much they have improved in the standings, according to Patterson.
"I always knew we were a team at Pick, but we've shown we are a team just with the teachers who have been involved with writing and collaborating and acting and the administrative support, the students and now the parents," Patterson said. "Everybody is on board. We're really showing that we really are just like a family and a team together."
The voting will close December 1 for the contest. Voters can log in and make an account to register to vote to support Pick Elementary School. The link to the movie and the voting is here: http://www.classroomrefreshcontest.com
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