Computer Donations

Dear Johnson Community:
This time we want to express our gratitude for supporting our students by donating used computers. In the last six months people from Sacramento and the surrounding areas have expressed their kindness with us and the environment by donating monitors, speakers, mice (the ones that don't bite but move the bytes), keyboards, and CPUs. We especially want to thank Stefan from Shingle Springs who donated 8 CPUs; Vi, a long-time contributor from Sacramento, who donated about 10 CPUs and monitors; Pablo in Davis, who donated 10 monitors, priters, wires, cables; and Rachael in Sacramento for making the right connections. We are also greatful with our parents who've made an extra effort to purchase an Internet connection.
Mr. C and Ms. Hernandez put the donated parts together, convince parents to subscribe to the Internet, connect to the Internet and show the students and parents how they can benefit from it. For us as teachers this has been an interesting experience. Our strategy to distribute those computers has been to raffle them off, and give them to families with many siblings at our school. Soon we discovered that we were not only reaching our own students, but also students from other schools in the community. In the picture above, we see students from Johnson, Noralto, and Smythe Academy. In the picture below-center, we see students from Grant High School and Martin Luther King Jr. High. In apartments students visit each other and work together using the schools website (www.tinyurl.com/2d4yuz) and other websites.
We also see how parents are learning to use this medium to find jobs, used items for sale, apartments for rent, to learn English, and even to prepare for the citizenship exam. For us teachers this envigors our belief in technology. We certainly trust that when technology is properly used it can complement and enrich instruction in the classrooms and make our community a better place.
We look forward to continuing working with you all and thus perfecting this enterprise. We've barely scratched the surface.
Thank you again,
Mr. C