GRANDPARENTS, PARENTS HEAD TO SCHOOL

PHOTOHammond Clark ninth grade student Eric Mendiola shows his mom Francine how to type in a command during a "Computers Don't Byte" program which allowed students to show parents and grandparents that computers can be easy to use. (ERIK MARKOV/POST-TRIBUNE)

THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED VERSION.

Vickie O'Connor of Highland remembered sitting at wooden desks with inkwells instead of pens decades ago.On Tuesday morning, O'Connor, 55, and her husband Tom, 57, took a trip on the information super-highway to see how their granddaughter uses technology in the classrooms at Clark High School.

"Don't Worry, It Won't Byte," was the slogan Tuesday for the Grandparents/Senior Citizens Day at Clark Middle and High School.

"I think the computers are great for kids," said Tom O'Connor. "We had to go to the books and hunt down the information when we were kids. When I was in school back in the '50s, I was in more trouble than I was in school. Nowadays, they have more to do in school. Computers could keep a lot of kids interested in learning."

Fallon O'Connor, 14, a freshman at Clark, showed her grandparents how to use the Internet.

"I'm happy they are here," she said. "Now I know they care about what I learn. They seem really fascinated."

Patty McKinley, head of the technology department at Clark, said the school staff opened its doors on Tuesday to allow grandparents and other senior citizens the chance to sample the Compaq laptops, Gateways, IBMs and Macs used at Clark.

"We wanted to bridge the gap between the generations," McKinley said. "They have been having a ball.

"When they were in school, there were chalkboards. Some of the grandparents were afraid to touch the computers. They said they were afraid they would break them."

Cindy Boilek, a sixth-grade reading teacher, gave a demonstration with the "Interactive White Board," a laptop computer connected to a projector, which projects images onto a white board.

"We can do virtual field trips on the Internet and project it up here," Boilek said. "We can use any of the applications, such as Excel, Power Point, Windows and Word, and we can project it and we can work with it."

Students use special pens to write on the screen or write with their fingers.

Boilek typed a sentence on her laptop. She then took an electric pen and showed how students use the pen to underline verbs in the sentence.

Just because students have technology does not mean they have perfected reading and writing and basic skills, Boilek said. She pointed out that students might spend a lot of time talking in chat rooms on the Internet, where young people use "slang" and disjointed sentences.

"The challenge is still the same," Boilek said. "They still need to know words, sentence structure and grammar. THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED VERSION.