Schools looking to go high-tech

by Kevin Lilly
Pharos-Tribune news editor

September 26, 2008 12:20 pm

— As a recent class got under way, ninth-grade English teacher Jessica Pasel did not have her students reach for their books or pencils or paper.
Instead, each freshman headed for a large, white box in the corner of the room. The box, referred to as a charging station, contained 30 Macintosh laptops with wireless Internet capabilities. The scene was a sign of the technological times.
The traditional classroom setting of a teacher standing at a blackboard before a group of students is changing, and Pasel and two other English teachers at Logansport High School are at the forefront of the transition.
“It’s a good year to be a guinea pig,” Pasel said in a recent interview.
Over the summer, Logansport Community School Corporation received a $138,000 grant from the Indiana Department of Education to improve language arts. With the money, school officials bought 90 laptop computers plus additional equipment.
This semester each LHS freshman uses the computers almost daily for research, writing and creating presentations.
For her honors class, Pasel assigned the novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee. Along with reading, Pasel supplemented her lesson with Internet research.
“Google your theme,” she instructed students.
The novel, set in the 1930s, is far removed from the society of 2008. To put the reading into context, Pasel had students study the political and social issues people dealt with back then and create a presentation using a software program called Keynote.
“That’s cool,” Jake Arthurs said as Pasel demonstrated how students could transition between scenes with the software.
When the students set out on their own, they became engrossed in the assignment.
Pasel says the computers have changed the dynamic of the classroom. Because she has them at her disposal, she said, she fits more instruction into a 50-minute class period.
“The laptops have made it so that we never have to leave the room to go to a computer lab, made the Internet accessible at any point and facilitated researching through Web catalogs and quick find searches,” Pasel said.
According to Mike Huffman, coordinator of innovative instructional technologies, the Indiana Department of Education is aiming for a statewide ratio of one computer for every student, but few school corporations are there yet.
“We need to make schools like businesses where people have one-to-one access,” Huffman said.
Business leaders learned quickly that sharing computers was inefficient and the same goes for schools, Huffman said.
Currently the statewide average is one computer to every four students. Many local schools fall within that range. Funding appears to be the biggest holdup in reaching the state’s goal.
At LHS, officials targeted freshman for a reason. The goal, said Principal Jack Gardner, was “getting the students right away using technology when they come into the high school.”
Gardner is concerned about freshman going from an English class with laptops back to pen and paper their sophomore year. To avoid that, officials are looking for additional grants.
“It’s totally dependent on our ability to find grants out there because this is a time of shrinking budgets. We don’t want our students to suffer and feel like we’re not able to progress because they have to go through school during a time when our whole nation’s finances are a little tight,” Gardner said. “You hate to say money makes the world go round, but it does make the educational world go round. We can only do these things if we can find dollars to make it happen.”
The Caston School Corporation is in a similar situation, but it did not receive a grant this year.
“Obviously we’d like to see more technology,” said Caston superintendent Dan Foster. “We realize it’s important, and we’re trying to give as much as we can to that, but in the realistic world, like everything else, we still have to watch the dollars and cents.”
For its approximate 360 students, Caston Junior-Senior High School has at least one desktop computer for student use in each classroom and about 100 computers in the school’s labs.
Foster says the school is looking into options for increasing the students’ access to computers. One possibility is a portable lab containing 20 to 30 laptops that could be moved from classroom to classroom. That approach would relieve scheduling conflicts that arise with the more traditional computer labs.
Teachers must use the labs for various online testing required by the state. During those times, students working on PowerPoint presentations and other projects must share computers.
At Pioneer Junior-Senior High School, demand for the computer labs is competitive throughout each day, according to John Pokorney, the school’s technology coordinator.
“The labs are almost always busy,” he said.
Pokorney referred to the labs as a scheduling nightmare and says the days of shared labs are numbered.
“Computer labs are on the way out,” he said.
Instead, each student would have their own portable computer. Gardner had a similar prediction.
“I think the next big jump in education will be when the textbook companies say we’re no longer printing these hardcopy textbooks and burning trees,” Gardner said.
Students would no longer haul heavy books. The book’s content would be stored on laptops issued to each student, similar to some colleges.
“I don’t think we’re too many years away from that jump,” Gardner said.
But like other schools uncertain about next year’s budget, doing so this school year is not possible.
“We would do more if we had more money,” Pokorney said.
In the meantime, Caston outfitted classrooms with projectors attached to computers.
“With these projectors now, the teachers can go to a Web site, pull it up and it’s right there for the whole class to see instead of 20 kids trying to huddle over a single computer screen,” Foster said.
Teachers use the online resources as a supplement to their lessons.
“We encourage teachers not to use that as a substitute for the instruction, but as a supplement,” Foster said. “We don’t want the technology to become the teacher.”
The expanded options allow educators to use an array of teaching styles, which accommodates the various learning styles of their students.
Logansport has a program called “e-instruction,” which also uses a projector attached to a computer. Students have a remote control to answer questions electronically. The program gives teachers instant feedback on which questions were missed by the class as a whole as well as by individual scores.
“It’s a great way to help teachers get things done quicker, better feedback for students and giving information instantly as to how the kids are doing,” Gardner said.
The school has only a few of the e-instruction programs.
Huffman stressed the importance of implementing technology into curriculum at the middle and high school levels, something that must happen to better prepare students for college and the workforce that is increasingly competing on a global scale. He says many schools are falling short.
“We literally have a system right now where kids when they get home, there is a tremendous amount of technology available to them,” Huffman said. “They can do all sorts of things. We send them to school, and it’s akin to sending them to a cave because schools don’t have the level of technology.”
Repeating a catch phrase he heard over the summer, Foster referred to students as “screenagers” because throughout a day, they encounter computer screens, cell phone screens, portable gaming systems and TV screens.
“The level of technology is high,” Huffman said. “Schools don’t have that level of technology today, and they need it to inspire kids.”
Huffman admits that schools are strapped financially. However, there is a solution and the best part is it’s free.
The solution is called open source, which, according to the 11th edition of “Computer Concepts,” is “an approach to developing and licensing software in which source code remains public so it can be improved and freely distributed.”
Using a computer operating system such as Linux, school corporations would avoid paying software licensing fees to companies such as Microsoft.
According to Huffman, the software performs equally well and can be downloaded free of charge.
“The beauty of open source is that there are thousands of developers out there that are working on it everyday, changing it, making it more stable. It really does work,” Huffman said. “It’s huge savings to schools to go with open source.”
On their own, some school corporations in Indiana have already implemented open source programming, saving them thousands of dollars each year. Officials at the state level are currently working on a way to spread the word about open source operating systems. Huffman is hopeful about Indiana’s future.
“It is a time of serious challenges, but also a time of some of the greatest opportunities that we’ve seen.”
Kevin Lilly can be reached at (574) 732-5117, or via e-mail at kevin.lilly@pharostribune.com

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