By Carrie McClish
Staff writer

St. Clement School in Hayward prides itself as a modest school offering quality Catholic education. But an award recently put the humble school in the limelight.

Catholic Telemedia Network (CTN) honored the school as the number one user of its Discovery Education and other online services in the Oakland Diocese. CTN offers multimedia services to teachers and students at 150 Bay Area schools participating in the program that helps improve student learning through the use of technology.

St. Clement School has been using CTN for more than 20 years, said Lana Jang, principal. In the early days, the program’s offerings were decidedly low-tech. “Lower grade teachers would play ‘Davey and Goliath’ for students on the television,” she said.

Today, while many teachers still use the “Davey and Goliath” episodes in their classrooms, other resources are also in play. Each teacher has access to a LCD projector and laptop computer on which to stream Discovery videos and other resources from CTN.

In 2008 the school won a SMART board, an interactive white board with a touch-sensitive screen that is connected to a computer or projector, for its high CTN usage.

In addition to the hardware, the school also receives personalized attention from an onsite coordinator at CTN who works one-on-one with teachers. The coordinator has helped teachers order videos and educational kits for social studies and science lessons.

The school uses the CTN resources in other ways as well. Teachers can request videos to show to the entire school and access videos on specific study projects. Students can also use CTN for research projects and assignments.

The school also taps into CTN’s religion resource website to help plan school liturgies and prayer services. In some cases, building a children’s liturgy for a specific day can be “daunting,” Jang noted. “CTN’s liturgy planners allow teachers to sigh in relief. They love using them as a guide and for expanding or changing the plan to accommodate our community.”

As part of its CTN honor, St. Clement School received a document projector and its faculty and staff were treated to a morning breakfast hosted by CTN as well as a plaque presented at a school assembly.

“It was wonderful to honor our faculty for their hard work,” Jang said. Integrating technology into the curriculum can be challenging, especially for seasoned teachers who didn’t have some of these classroom resources earlier in their careers. “Our teachers have reached out of their comfort zone and supplemented their curriculum for 21st century learning,” she said proudly. “This task is made so much easier with CTN and its staff.”

Catholic Telemedia Network is co-owned by the dioceses of Oakland and San Jose.

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