To help motivate students to read, special technology will be distributed for free to five English and language arts classrooms at Calhoun Middle School.

Georgia Department of Education recently announced that Calhoun Middle is one among four schools in the state selected to receive an approximately $93,500 literacy grant funded through a new program designed to provide supplementary help to students in reading.

The equipment will include Macintosh computers, digital cameras and hand-held camcorders with tripods.

In order to be eligible for Title II funds, each school had to devise a plan on how they would spend the money on technology to improve literacy if awarded.

Five of the English and language arts teachers at the middle school collaborated with Calhoun City’s technology team director Jody Maffetone and technology coach Greta Hughes and wrote up a grant last May. The school system was notified of the award in July.

Principal Greg Green said the grant is particularly pertinent because reading is the central focus at the middle school this year.

“On the first day of school the teachers and students met in the gym to kick off the reading across the curriculum imitative,” he said.

Now the literacy grant will be timed to correspond with this year’s school goal, he added.

“You are always proud that someone will invest money into a new project that will help your school,” Green said. “We have a community of teachers that are ready to try new things and it will help us meet our mission.”

Not only will students be set up in their classrooms to read books through literacy fluency software, but young-sters will also work on expanding their writing skills.

“Now they are going from listening to stories in the elementary school to being able to create their own stories using multimedia software,”Green said.

He also mentioned that the grant would benefit teachersm too.

“It’s basically a state pilot program to increase student literacy. We have five teachers that will be doing it for the year,” he said. “It also pays for teacher staff development at Dalton State College for education and technical support.”

The computers, technology software and equipment are expected to arrive at the school sometime by the end of this month, officials stated.

Tonya Turner, intervention specialist, said the grant represents an excellent opportunity for students to learn creatively.

“One of the features is that there is a reading theatre to help strengthen reading comprehension skills that they need to know,” Turner said.

Michelle Doane, one of the five language arts teachers at CMS whose classrooms will use the literary software, said she looks at the benefits of the program as long term.

It’s a good incentive for eighth-grade students to prepare for reading assignments in high school, she said.

“Another thing is that high school text books are written two grade levels above a students’ reading level. This will help them pick up the vocabulary and challenge them,” Doane said.