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Find more Kappan articles in the Subscribe today to access complete current issues online! TECHNOLOGY: Toward a New Model of High-Tech Schoolrooms IF YOU wanted to remodel your house, you wouldn't do it all at once. Instead, you would do it one room at a time. School reform, like home remodeling, ought to be done one room at a time. Any plan that aims to reform a whole school all at once is a dubious one. After all, kids do not learn from schools. Kids learn from teachers in classrooms. A whole school is too large an increment of change. Building high-tech schools is a similarly dubious idea. Trust me. I have helped to build five of them. Only one of these two- to three-year projects was really successful. So if I were to do it all over again, my goal would be radically different. I would shift the focus from the traditional model of creating a high-tech school to a model of creating a high-tech schoolroom. The traditional model for a high-tech school is to simply put four to six networked computers in every classroom and one on every teacher's desk. The hidden assumption is that teachers will be flexible enough to integrate these computers into their instructional day. This is generally not the case, and no amount of staff development will make it work. Teachers in elementary schools have highly structured -- or routinized -- days, consisting of activities like calendar time, board work, silent reading, story time, paired reading, author's chair, journal writing, math instruction, center time, and resource time (library, PE, art, etc.). About the only time elementary teachers are willing to let students use computers is during center time or while they are waiting to go to lunch or to go home. I know this picture is accurate because I have sat at many school network hubs and used network monitoring software to track computer use. Generally speaking, there is a surge of activity from about 10:45 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., depending on the lunch schedule. Rarely do students get to use classroom computers at other times. This has led me to say often in this column that "one computer used four hours a day is equal to four computers used one hour a day." The high-tech school model doesn't work all that well in secondary schools either. Teachers in secondary schools tend to use a lecture or lecture/discussion model of instruction. Secondary teachers seem to believe that every student needs to hear everything they say. Sending some students to work on the classroom computers while the teacher is "teaching" is not often done. Apart from the teachers' reluctance to integrate computers into their classes, a real problem with the traditional high-tech school model is that in a 40-classroom school, you would need about 250 computers -- all aging at the same rate. In three years, these 250 computers would need to be replaced at a cost of about $250,000, plus a lot of labor. School districts often do not have a "currency plan" for computer replacement every three years, so the computers get to be four, five, or even six years old. When computers get this old, they fail, and the school's technology gets a "black eye." In addition to the computers in each classroom, the high-tech school model often includes a 30-seat computer lab and sometimes calls for a small television production studio. My experience has been that computer labs need a full-time computer resource teacher to be successful. Expecting every faculty member to schedule the lab and to know how to use it productively with students is simply unrealistic. Moreover, a school with 250 computers, all the network equipment, and several servers needs a full-time technician. My experience with small television studios is that they are usually in rooms that can accommodate only a dozen or so students. If I were going to install a teaching television studio, I would design it in such a way that some 30 students could use it at once. But that would require a double-sized room. As I mentioned above, only one of the five high-tech schools that I helped build was really successful. This school was Webster Elementary in St. Augustine, Florida. The principal, Roger Coffee, who is now retired, had spent over 10 years carefully assembling one of the best faculties of any school I have ever visited. He chose teachers so carefully that he knew whom he was going to recruit before the next vacancy opened. Furthermore, Roger never hired a teacher without seeing him or her teach. Roger was himself an enthusiastic techie. As soon as we got a year or so into the project, Roger made technology integration a part of his annual teacher evaluation process. A hand-picked faculty, an enthusiastic leader, and a teacher evaluation system that made technology use a priority are three factors that are difficult to find in most schools. The obstacles I've discussed led me to begin thinking about building high-tech classrooms instead of high-tech schools. In the January column, "The Earth on the Web," I discussed the value of specialized geography/Earth science labs at the secondary level. It would be even better to have one of each. Students in the intermediate grades could also profit from such labs, for browsing the Earth on the Web is best done with workstation-class computers usually not found in schools. In the February column, "Really Advanced Technology," I discussed several other specialized classrooms that fit well in a high-tech schoolroom model, including a planetarium, a 360-degree immersion theater, and a high-definition television production lab. As an aside, I have always thought that schools paid too little attention to oral language development. When is the last time you saw a high school speech course? The emphasis at nearly every grade level seems to be on the written word more than on the spoken word. Using a teaching television studio to give students the opportunity to hear and see themselves speaking and presenting is certainly one way to improve this situation. Giving students the role of sound technicians in a studio allows them to develop a new appreciation of microphone placement, enunciation, and so on. A desktop video-editing lab is another valuable high-tech classroom. When you edit video on a computer, you always edit the sound first. Thus sound editing opens up all kinds of other possibilities for students to understand the spoken word. At the level of the individual classroom, I would try to match the technology to the grade, subject, and teaching style of the teacher. In many cases, this would mean installing a data/video projector connected to a computer and a document camera. In a different scenario, a classroom-by-classroom approach might entail buying camcorders for students to use to create short films, documentaries, or video journals. If the high-tech schoolroom model was implemented in a secondary school with a traditional seven-period day, students could regularly have access to and work in the kind of high-tech classrooms described here. Technology would become an integral part of the curriculum and not a high-tech add-on. A third model for using technology in the schools, an alternative to the two models described above, is the "high computer access" (HCA) model -- or, as Apple calls it, the "1-on-1" model. In this model, every student at a grade level or in a particular school is given a laptop computer. My reading of the literature on this approach leads me to believe that it does not raise achievement as measured by tests but it does greatly improve students' self-concept with regard to academic ability and other important nonachievement outcomes. An HCA approach also radically changes the teaching/learning environment. In many districts, there may be a compelling reason for an HCA approach at a particular grade level. In Florida, for example, giving all fourth-graders computers and having them do a lot of writing using a word processor might help them pass the fourth-grade Florida Writes test -- a high-stakes or barrier test. A fourth approach to using technology in a school district might be to concentrate the technology in an all-out effort to narrow the "achievement gap." In an urban district, this might entail using the HCA approach in low-performing inner-city schools. I have always wanted to see controlled experimental research done on this idea. Maybe then we could learn whether or not the students with the best technology and the best ability to use it to do academic work move to the head of the class. Tech Briefs * Google.com has a useful "cheat sheet" that helps you refine your searches. The cheat sheet is two pages long and can be found at www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html. Using these shortcuts can streamline your searching considerably. * Ion-audio just announced the world's first USB audio turntable that lets you convert your old vinyl records directly to MP3 files on your computer. The turntable, which sells for about $150, comes with software for both Macs and PCs. Find out more at www.ionaudio.com/products/turntables/iTTUSB.html. * Apple just announced a new iBook and iMac with dual-core Intel processors. I was about to order a full-sized Mac tower with a dual-layer IBM G5 processor, but it looks like the iMac will have about the same specifications for nearly $1,000 less. And it comes with a 20-inch LCD display. We will have to wait for the reviews to come in to be sure how the new Intel-processor machines perform. ROYAL VAN HORN is a professor of education at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville (e-mail: rvanhorn@unf.edu; websites: www.electronicscholar.com and www.luckychild.us). |
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