Stow Senior Creighton Cloud walks into the Polymers classroom, a room full of lab equipment, computers, and plastics. He dons his white lab coat, safety glasses and begins the burning I.D lab, where a student burns a small piece of plastic and tries to determine it by the smell, flame color, and smoke of it. The aroma of polyethylene, polypropylene and PVC fill the cubicle.
“I always really like figuring out how to do things and the stuff revolving around it. I want to know the inner-workings of some little piece of machinery,” Cloud said.

This classroom is like no other in RHS. The things people can learn here are only available for people in the Engineering Academy at Stow-Munroe High School. The Engineering Academy along with other Career Tech programs allow for this kind of inter-district working. The Career Tech program is a program where students can learn skills in a job medium to help prepare them in the future.

I have been attending Stow for a semester each of the last two years, and there are definitely some advantages in attending classes there. The most noticeable is that the Stow embraces the use of technology. The one thing you will notice is the availability of YouTube. While there is always the possibility of students goofing off rather that doing work, the website can be a great resource to the classroom. For example, while I was there, our Physics teacher had us learn an entire chapter by ourselves. One of the criteria was to find online links and videos teaching torque. For five days straight, we would get the school’s netbooks and find links of websites to learn the subject. We would post these links into Google’s Group feature so everybody in the class could find them and use them at a later date. This was a unique use of technology to say the least, considering RHS’ continued blocking of YouTube (amongst other video sites). Perhaps this is something that Kent can learn from Stow.

Another great use of technology was found in my math class. At first glance, the math class seems the same. Math books stacked in the corner, smart-boards, and few windows make this look like a typical set-up. However, outside of the classroom is where some of Kent’s math teachers could be learning Stow’s teaching methods. The math teacher would record the notes on the smart-board and record his voice during the class. From there he would upload the whole thing as a video on YouTube. From there I could easily look up videos and notes on his website. It proved to be a really helpful tool to study within the class.
Distributed technology has forever changed how the world and the classroom interact. The Career Tech program is part of that as well, distributing knowledge and access across the six member schools including Hudson, Tallmadge, Woodridge, and Cuyahoga Falls. I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of a program that has given me a head-start in my college career that’s only a short bus ride away.