Putting Computers in Classrooms
In surveying students in our district, the technology committee found that
over 80% of Wappingers students have computers in their homes and over
half of them have access to the Internet. This number is surprised many
members of the technology committee. Nationally, only about 40% of homes
have computers in them. Still, it shouldn't be entirely surprising. The
most likely homes to have computers in them are the homes of upwardly mobile
professionals with children, and a large percentage of district residents
work in the computer industry. Certainly, this is wonderful news for our
children, especially at a time when the Internet is becoming the biggest
and most accessible library of information the world has ever known. It
means that, even if nothing is done to make modern computer technology
available in our schools, that most students in our district will know
how to use computers anyway. It means that, even when no information can
be found on a particular topic in our local libraries (an increasingly
common occurrence), that students can complete research for papers anyway.
However good this news may be, however, it also means that we are increasingly
facing a situation that has never happened before in the history of public
education, and which most of us would agree is unacceptable: Our children,
in most cases, have access to better and more complete reference materials
at home than they have at school. This is exactly the situation we
are seeking to address in the new district technology plan. There are several
key elements of this plan, including:
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A district network that interconnects all of the computers in the WCSD.
This will allow our students, teachers, and administrators to communicate
with each other all across the district via E-Mail, groupware, and other
means. More importantly, however, it will allow us to provide resources
to all of our classrooms from a single maintained server area, lowering
our curriculum and staff costs, and to diagnose and solve problems in classrooms
from that central site, further reducing staff, travel, and repair costs.
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District wide access to the Internet. This will give our students the same
kind of access to materials and people from around the world that they
have at home, but from their classrooms. The Internet will make foreign
languages real for our language students by allowing them to access Internet
sites in the countries that use their language. The Internet will make
government come alive for students who can visit the web pages of the White
House, the U.S. Congress, their representatives at the national and state
level. The Internet will make English come alive by allowing students to
visit the Web sites or working poets and authors. The list goes on and
on. There is no subject that we teach in our district that will not grow
richer and more accessible when we bring the Internet into the classroom.
This will, of course, be done securely. We can and will protect our children
by placing a firewall gateway between our students and adult content.
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Computers in classrooms that can be used as resources. We are no longer
in a situation where we need to put computers in classrooms in order to
teach children how to use them. Our children already know how to use computers,
and can generally figure out almost any piece of software. We need computers
in classrooms so they can be used as resources. Our technology plan proposes
to place computers, as resources, into four kinds of settings:
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Elementary school classrooms, where we propose to install five computers
in each classroom. This will allow all our elementary students to use computers
in three ways:
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for one on one extension and enrichment of classwork using software that
reinforces and extends the elementary school curriculum.
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as a group resource for doing group projects and finding materials related
to those projects. A lot of elementary school software is specifically
designed to allow students to work in small groups around a single computer.
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as a one on one resource for exploring new ideas once the days basics have
been covered and mastered. This will help keep our districts best and brightest
students engaged and excited when they get ahead of the rest of the class.
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Middle and High School classrooms, where we propose to install one computer
in each classroom. This computer can be used to access classroom resources
from the internet, as a window on the world that can be used to find information
when questions come up in class, and as a presentations resource that allows
students and teachers to access prepared presentation materials and Internet
web sites.
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Computer resource rooms (labs) in which students can use computers either
one on one or in pairs. These computer resource rooms are particularly
important in our middle and high schools, where computer access in the
classroom will be more restricted, but students are expected to do more
research and report writing. We expect these rooms to sometimes be used
mostly by classes, but we also expect at least some of these rooms to be
available to students during free periods.
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Libraries, where computers are already an increasingly important resource.
The district technology plan provides all of these kinds of computer access
in our schools. The technology committee, of which I am a member, expects
that it will substantially improve the education of our students.
