When it comes to educational innovation, one has to applaud Clinton City and Sampson County school for not only dipping its toes in the water, but often wading out to the deep end, all in the name of providing programs that will get students excited about learning.

Two such innovative programs are the Project K-Nect in the county system and Flocabulary in Clinton City.

Both are novel approaches to learning that reach students through things with which they can easily relate, such as music and cell phones.

With Flocabulary, the city system is introducing after school studying and learning habits through the use of the very popular Hip Hop genre. In its early stages, the program’s sights are on students at Sunset Avenue Elementary and Clinton High schools. The focus centers around at-risk students, honors curriculum students and those in after school tutorial programs.

The object is to use Flocabulary as a means of keeping students’ interest and helping them to better absorb that which is being taught, with the ultimate goal of improving test scores and, thus, student success rates.

In the county system, Union and Hobbton high schools are the sites for pilot K-Nect programs which utilize Smartphone technology in algebra classes. Currently 15 ninth-graders at Hobbton and another 19 at Union are taking part in the project, which allows them to access supplemental math content aligned to their teacher’s current lesson plan objectives. In addition, students will be able to collaborate with each other, access tutors after school to assist with master skill sets participate in blogs and podcasts and communicate electronically with teachers and administrators.

It’s amazing uses of technology that put both school systems in closer touch with how their students learn. And in doing so, it will provide students with more and better opportunities to achieve academic success.

While both projects are far from the three Rs that many Sampson County residents are used to in the academic world, it will have the same impact, that of encouraging students to learn and reaching them where they are and taking them to higher academic plateaus than they once expected to reach.

It is to the credit of educators in both systems that they didn’t opt to sit on their laurels and continue doing academics as usual. Out-of-the box thinking is required to meet the ever-changing needs of what students need to learn in this global economy in which we all now live.

Thanks to innovative thinking on the part of educational leaders and the support of teachers willing to try new things, students in Clinton City and Sampson County schools will be beneficiaries of educations they will need to compete in the global market they will all enter when they graduate from high school and other two or four-year institutions.

Parents should be grateful for their willingness to draw outside the lines of normal educational pictures so their children will have the most opportunities for educational success possible.

Just looking at the offerings now on the plates of the two school systems, we are certainly moving in that direction.