Plugged In
By Alexander Russo
For
years, educator Maria Fico, a regional technology specialist in the Bronx, New
York, has been holding an Internet-based “poetry slam” competition
for children attending 20 local elementary schools. Fico would cobble together
various Internet connections so that she could run four different locations
at a time—three competing schools plus a site for the judges. Everyone
made do with jerky images and awkward lag time.
The kids love these twice-annual events, even though the technology is far from ideal. “There’s always at least a five-second delay,” Fico says, making it hard to watch and judge the performances. “It’s always kind of jittery.”
Two months ago, at the National Educational Computing Conference in Philadelphia, however, Fico and her kids got a chance to demonstrate what the poetry competition would be like over Internet2, the small, research-based alternative to the main Internet that most of us use.
Created nearly 10 years ago by a consortium of research universities, Internet2 is an invitation-only, high-speed network that promises to fulfill many of the initial expectations for what was once called the information superhighway—fast and reliable data transmission that educators can use for instruction or other purposes.
With Internet2’s speed, Fico’s poetry competition included a new visual art component as a backdrop to the poetry and a much less distracting interface. “There was no delay,” says Fico. “It was a lot smoother, and the art was a great complement to the poetry.”
Over the past three years, Internet2 has slowly opened up to more than research universities. In particular, states, districts, and individual schools have been invited to join Internet2, often using capacity created through the E-Rate connectivity programs.
As of last year, roughly 27,000 schools, museums, libraries, and community colleges have been participating, some of them quite regularly, and 34 state education agencies have signed on. As many as 10 more states are expected to join in the near future.
“Internet2 offers a much better infrastructure for using broadband applications such as video conferencing, webcasting, high-quality streaming video, and media-rich interactive courses,” says John Fleischman, director of technology services for the Sacramento (CA) County Office of Education. “As the commodity Internet gets increasingly impacted, it makes good sense for K–12 educators to use the Internet2 infrastructure as the network medium of choice.”
Some of the most common uses of Internet2 by schools include high-quality video conferencing and virtual field trips—so-called real-time communication with detail and speed that often aren’t possible with regular broadband connections.
For educators, this means no more buses and auditoriums—not necessarily a bad thing.
“Video conferencing is, at present, the most popular application of Internet2 for K–12,” says Internet2 guru Louis Fox, executive director of the Internet2 K20 Initiative and vice provost of the University of Washington. This includes students’ meeting other students from around the world and working on a common project, or meeting with scientists to find out about cutting-edge research, or taking virtual tours of cultural, scientific, and historical institutions in the U.S. and beyond.
For students, Internet2 also makes possible high-speed tasks such as viewing and manipulating satellite images or controlling remote electron microscopes or telescopes. There are also a host of instructional resources that can be enhanced by Internet2, including sites like WGBH’s Teachers’ Domain and the Research Channel.
Internet2 isn’t just for kids, however. Internet2 is also being used to deliver professional development and other video-conferencing opportunities to educators.
Not every school has the connectivity to take full advantage of Internet2, which can have the same familiar problems as the regular Internet. One reason is that not everyone is hooked up at top speed. As of last year, only about half the participating schools have been linking up at speeds of 1.5Mbps or greater. And students at several universities have recently been sued for exchanging music and video files through file-sharing programs that exploited the system’s speed.
To find out if you’re already on the network, check here: http://detective.internet2.edu. To find out if your state is already signed on—usually through a university sponsor—there is a map here: http://k20.internet2.edu/segp/currentparticipants.html.
Three Big Deals
In May, the Plano (TX) Independent School District selected Riverdeep’s Destination Success to help close the achievement gap among at-risk students. The district will make Destination Reading and Destination Math courseware available in all of its 42 elementary schools. Teachers and administrators will use the Destination Success Learning Management System to assess students and prescribe lessons based on individual needs.
Alabama and STI completed the STI Special Education Tracking System in May. It is the first statewide web-based special education data management system. More than 6,300 special education teachers will use the system to track the progress and monitor the quality and outcomes of services for nearly 100,000 special needs students. The state began building the system in 2003.
The Manteo ThinkPad Learning Project, a pilot one-to-one computing program for middle and high school students in Manteo, North Carolina, began in May. Students received ThinkPad notebooks loaded with VitalSource educational software, and their families received free wireless Internet access from Charter Communications.
How to Improve Distance Learning
Most administrators hear
the words distance learning and think virtual schools. But the most popular
type of distance learning is interactive television (I-TV). A 2003 study by
the National Center for Education Statistics found that 64 percent of rural
districts use two-way I-TV. A lot of rural schools and districts have formed
I-TV consortiums, where they partner to tap into one another’s resources.
We spoke with Vicki Hobbs, an expert in effective use of new technologies for
education, about successful I-TV consortiums.
Why do districts set up I-TV consortiums?
There are three reasons: First, your school or district can’t provide
a comprehensive curriculum that students need and want; second, you can’t
find or hire the teachers to provide that curriculum; or third, you can’t
afford to hire every teacher for every advanced subject matter and curriculum
area.
How can I-TV consortiums help?
Regardless of the size of the school or district, students have access to any
course they want or need, including advanced placement (AP) or dual-credit courses.
If one school’s Spanish teacher retires and another school in the consortium
has a Spanish teacher, school A may decide to hire a German teacher instead.
Over time, the complementary nature of the expertise represented by respective
faculties grows. Students can take advantage of the collective offerings of
the consortium schools whether or not the class is taught by a local teacher.
How can schools and districts get started?
First, find partner schools or districts. The optimum size is five or six schools
or small districts. Then develop a set of operating principles. It’s essential
to agree on a common calendar and bell schedule. Next, put together bids and
technology specifications. Be sure to bring your board, teachers, staff, and
community into the planning process.
What are some common pitfalls?
One mistake is to believe that it’s all about the technology and not planning
how to deal with the consortium organization. To counteract this, hire a part-time
director who can work with all involved to build class schedules, train I-TV
teachers, and carry out consortium policies. Choose facilitators—ideally
at each school or district. The facilitator will pick up e-mail, handle in-
and out-boxes before and after school, and manage minor technology problems.
Also, it’s a mistake to not include teachers and counselors in the planning. A technology imposed on teachers and staff will result in reticence at best and rejection at worst.
There
is general consensus that so-called drive-by technology professional development
for faculty doesn’t work. So more and more school leaders are letting
teachers train one another, practice what they learn, and manage their own development.
Dr. Kenneth Eastwood, superintendent of the Enlarged City School District of Middletown, New York, honed his professional development (PD) skills at the Oswego (NY) City School District, where he worked from 1990 through 2004. Early on, Eastwood realized that tech-savvy teachers often made terrible technology instructors. So he spent a year getting teachers known for their teaching skills up to speed on various software packages. Those teachers taught classes and mentored peers.
Participation in the program grew from 15 percent in 1996 to 98 percent in 2002, at which time the average teacher had 45 hours of staff development in technology integration alone. “You need to understand the psychology and personalities of educators in general and use that knowledge to provide sensitive, quality instructors who know this stuff is difficult,” says Eastwood.
At the Mount Logan Middle School in Logan, Utah, Principal Dan Johnson oversees many layers of technology training. Throughout the year, teachers sign up to learn applications during daylong sessions. But they don’t merely learn how to work the program; they learn how the software can help them accomplish their classroom goals.
This type of targeted learning sets effective PD programs apart from the superficial training that many experts refer to as drive-by PD. “The successful schools carefully plan and align PD with improvement goals,” says Kate Nolan, chief officer of the professional services group at Learning Point Associates, an education nonprofit based in Naperville, Illinois. “They find that the planning time is well worth the benefits, such as pretty quick improvement in student achievement.”
One of Johnson’s other innovations is the summer training program, where teachers learn how to use different forms of technology to develop a teaching unit correlated to a state standard. Then they teach that unit during a two-week summer-school session. “When they come back in the fall, they know how to write standards-based lessons and use technology to improve teaching and learning,” says Johnson.
Almost all of his 70 teachers can teach a technology class. “We know our staff development is powerful and has made a difference in our students’ performance,” says Johnson.
The Big Score
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The
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Don’t think you have the cash for such flashy extravagance? See if a
local sponsor will foot the bill. Daktronics, a scoreboard supplier based in
South Dakota, offers the Victory program, which links schools to sponsors who
not only help fund new equipment but also often raise additional money for the
school. Next time the varsity squad has an away game, it may be prudent to check
the end zone for any new additions. “Crosstown rivalries always spur sales,”
says Jeff Reeser, national sales manager for Fair-Play, another manufacturer.
“It’s like the arms race. It always has to be bigger than the other
guy’s.”
