just a trendy
learning tool.
Even before
connecting to
students and
teachers are
discovering a
new electronic
culture.
Jared just got back from Atlanta where he reviewed the city's preparation for the Olympics; Megan is waiting her turn to visit California to see what the land along the San Andreas fault looks like; Jessica is hoping to take a tour of the Great Wall of China this afternoon. These aren't executives or scientists running up their frequent-flier miles, but students doing research in new-style classrooms taking shape across America.
Connecting classrooms to the Internet and introducing technology to education is a hot topic today. President Clinton even made it an administration priority by highlighting it in his State of the Union address.
New technology in the classrooms adds up to more than just a new learning device in the corner of the room. In many ways it fosters shifts in the classroom culture. This change in culture and perspective begins to occur long before the first student logs onto the Internet.
THE SPRING BRANCH WAY
"I was hired by the Spring Branch Independent School District [SBISD, Houston, Texas] as the executive director of Computer Services in October of 1992," said Ed Gifford. "Prior to my hiring, there was no 'single vision' of technology. Each department and campus had little or no direction for technology. Computer Services was only responsible for administrative, back office support, while Instructional Technology was led by technology coordinators. I began by visiting each campus and gathering basic functional requirements and to 'establish a face' to Computer Services."
Once technology had a face and Gifford had established himself as the "lightning rod" for any problems or issues relating to technology, he formed a five-year strategic technology planning committee to which everyone was invited. The group started with 160 interested individuals which soon dwindled to 45 dedicated participants.
"The committee consisted of principals, community leaders, business leaders, councilors, registrars, teachers, administrators, librarians, coordinators, etc.," said Gifford. "We defined three subcommittees focusing on competency goals, technology goals and technology impact assessment. After four months of meeting, we developed a 'single unified voice/vision' represented by the five-year strategic technology plan."
Gifford circumvented the constant debates about money, and who should get what, by devising a formula to level the playing field, to take the possibility of favoritism out of how money and equipment were allocated.
"The five-year technology plan states that the district should have one intelligent workstation for every three district professionals, and one intelligent workstation for every six students," said Gifford. "We took a physical inventory of every computer in the district. We gave each computer type a weighted average based upon functionality and longevity. After the weighted average was applied, each campus had a logical inventory. This eliminated the struggle for 'me first.' We also included funds for peripherals, printers, local area network (LAN) equipment, supplies, etc."
As of now, LAN and WAN (wide area network) connectivity is complete for the entire district and has been functioning for a year. The district is now working to develop a library of the future and to break away from the concept that a student has to go to a room with four walls to get access to information. Instead, information will be available from virtually anywhere. An information specialist serving the same function as a librarian will monitor, manage and organize the data for use.
"We are also working toward two-way video for distance learning," said Gifford. "We have a premier physics teacher in one of the high schools -- why can't we leverage that resource to other schools?"
Gifford's vision of video is more than talking heads -- he wants to provide real two-way communication so students and teachers can see each other and interact. That requires more bandwidth than the schools currently have, so the infrastructure is going through another round of upgrades. Already, though, the available technology has changed both how the classrooms run and how the administration gets its work done.
"What I have personally seen [in the classroom] is that students have become independent learners and thinkers," noted Gifford. "Teachers will provide the students with a specific lesson object but it is up to the students to figure out how to achieve that. I saw some fourth-graders and their research project was to determine the unique characteristics of different areas of Texas. Two of them worked on the Panhandle, two on the hill country, two on the Rio Grande area. The task is the same, but what they access in terms of resources is totally different. They logged onto the Internet and looked at the Chamber of Commerce of a particular area or the home page of a city or the cultural mix of a region. If you gave the same project to 20 people, you'd get 20 different results."
Although the initial response was fear on the part of some teachers, Gifford noticed they soon realized that they were learning skills too and the fear transformed into a new level of excitement. The teachers are now learners themselves.
"A student might come upon a home page and the teacher becomes the learner from the student, not just a lecturer giving information which the students regurgitate. If they can harness the excitement of learning, it will be transferred to the students and they'll feed off each other," said Gifford. "Once the teachers get over that emotional hurdle that they're losing control, then the excitement is really amazing."
For the administration, e-mail has become the lifeblood of the district. Gifford estimates staff have saved thousands of hours in travel for meetings just by moving most of the day-to-day traffic onto e-mail.
SAN DIEGO
Anne Skelton, of the San Diego Unified School District, has a mammoth task bringing her school system onto the Internet. San Diego has approximately 120,000 students made up of 16 high schools, 22 middle and junior high schools and 115 elementary schools -- 200 locations in all.
In 1990, an IBM mainframe-based system was tied into all the schools for administrative functions and this simple introduction to technology served to get the network in the door. Skelton feels that eased efforts to expand from there.
"In 1992 we upgraded the infrastructure and put in fiber between the closets and introduced multiple protocols so we had a total LAN environment," said Skelton. "Each group is autonomous and each school is autonomous down to having their choice of desktops. The driving force for getting the network out to the school was to get e-mail out to the principals, which then brought Internet access to the schools. From the instructional folks, the excitement was the Internet stuff."
Skelton is currently working on a project to provide technology upgrades at the middle schools so they all have schoolwide networks. Currently, one-third of the high schools are complete. A year and a half ago, there were 1,350 units on the system. Today that has skyrocketed to 13,000.
Richard Fabian, an educational technology specialist, is one of the people within the school system assigned to help students and teachers use the network as it becomes available.
Students are getting onto the Internet, said Fabian, "one school has set up their own home page. And every student has an Internet e-mail address. Some teachers have been using it quite a bit. For example, CNN broadcasts a program from midnight to 3:00 a.m. which teachers are allowed to tape. They then go through the network and get the lesson plans [for use with the taped program]."
Fabian feels the new system is giving students faster access to more information. Some are even able to access information from home. Plans exist to extend that availability by providing homework centers at five public libraries, which students will be able to use to write reports online, conduct research, etc.
Having terminals in the classroom has also meant that students can work together on research projects. Down the line Fabian expects to offer instruction to develop students' thinking skills to help them sift through all the new information they have access to. He sees this as particularly important for the day -- not too long off -- when cable modems hit and homes have Internet access over high-speed lines.
TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION
According to a June 1995 statement from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce, a landmark study on the use of technology for children with disabilities showed that "almost three-quarters of school-age children were able to remain in a classroom, and 45 percent were able to reduce school-related services" when computer-assisted learning techniques were employed.
Another study, published in the American Educational Research Journal, found that: "A comparison of peer tutoring, adult tutoring, reducing class size, increasing the length of the school day, and computer-based instruction found computer-based instruction to be the least expensive instructional approach for raising mathematics scores by a given amount."
Whatever the final form of the national technology infrastructure -- whether it is controlled by cable companies, phone companies or a mix of both -- technology will continue to firm up its grip on the workplace, and fast Internet access will soon be available in the home. It is therefore important to begin early when educating children to use technology.
Forward thinking communities are connecting to the information superhighway now, both to increase education's efficiency and to prepare their students for the world which awaits them. In return, those communities may find the culture of their classrooms has been transformed.
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SPRING BRANCH
The district is cross-platform with about 80 percent Macintosh computers and the others DOS/Windows. Microsoft products dominate with e-mail handled by MS Exchange. Bay Networks has provided most of the networking equipment and the network itself runs mostly on Internet Protocol with some IPX for older systems and AppleTalk for some of the Macs.
SAN DIEGO
San Diego will have an ATM backbone by next year and should be able to run ATM in all the schools. This sets them up for the high-speed connections needed for video and other applications, even though the schools aren't yet running applications that need the high speeds. By using intelligent hubs that can be centrally managed with SNMP, Skelton's team is able to keep IT staff small.
Ninety percent of the desktops are Macintosh because of the instructional software available for the Mac, although all the administration systems are PC-based. Both platforms are supported by the client/server architecture San Diego is using. Although staff are in the process of upgrading some of their Novell boxes, Skelton sees NT as the future.
The district technology plan calls for six drops in each classroom -- at least one for students, one for teachers and a printer. This is in addition to the lab rooms which will have multiple terminals.
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