Jim Rodriguez

CECS 5400.020

Dr. Gerald Knezeck

The Benefits of a technology based education for K-12 participants

The school community (commonly referred to as K-12 in the U.S., meaning kindergarten through 12^th grade) is starting to focus its attention on the Internet. Most school networking activity has occurred in the United States, however, there are projects being initiated in Canada, Japan, the UK and other countries looking for a new way to teach tomorrow's leaders. The Internet is being used for aspects of education, including administrative, educational, professional development, and community building. Distance education is often defined as a physical separation between student and instructor. This separation may be bridged in many ways--print, fax, telephone, electronic mail, regular mail, desktop video conferencing, Internet chats, and on-line discussions forums, to name just a few.

In seeking to integrate technology, school administrators have tended to follow one of two routes. Some have taken a "trailblazers" approach, focusing technical and professional-development resources on teachers most eager to use technology. In a trailblazers approach, programs are set up to appeal to what are known as "early adopters." These programs require a great deal of effort from teachers, but they also offer teachers significant potential payback, both professionally and materially. Teachers who are early adopters often are involved in field-testing software and new curricular approaches. The trouble with this approach is that it is usually limited to a small number of teachers.

A second route -- what we call the "equity" approach -- involves every teacher in learning the broadest, simplest, and most general technological skills (Some examples include training in basic software such as Microsoft Word or an e-mail program). It is not unusual for this kind of training to be focused on the technology alone while excluding its educational purposes. As a consequence, it does little to help technology serve a school's educational reform agenda. What's more, while the skills learned might be valuable, the approach toward teachers is often "do this or else."

Too often, schools treat these approaches as if they were mutually exclusive. The result is that students are deprived of opportunities to use technology in meaningful ways in a variety of subjects. Moreover, the failure to connect the two approaches means that teachers seldom serve as technological resources to each other. Indeed, many teachers have only a vague idea of the ways their fellow teachers might use technology.

The common tool kit, and the multiple opportunities to learn more about it, served as the backdrop for the Technology Action Plans (TAPs), which focused on individual use of the tool kit during the first year. Teachers and specialists were asked to pick one application or curricular issue to focus their technology integration efforts. Initially, the most popular technology applications chosen were PowerPoint and Internet search engines. Teachers liked PowerPoint because presentation is such a critical feature of school life -- and elementary teachers quickly realized that, with its large print, PowerPoint was a great tool for creating student-made books. Teachers liked the Internet search engines for finding information that was more up-to-date than what was available in the library.

Once they picked a technology application, teachers were asked to create a plan for technology integration within one curricular unit. For example, a middle school home economics teacher and a school nurse teamed up to use the Internet for teaching a health unit where students would conduct Internet searches on issues such as AIDS, teen pregnancy, and smoking. Second-grade teachers used the Amazing Writing Machine to create student storybooks for the school library. And a freshman biology teacher had students using multiple technologies -- such as the Internet, scanners, Smart Keyboards, Hyperstudio, Adobe PhotoShop, and Microsoft Word -- to gather and present information about biological life.

From the outset, "co-teaching" has been an important part of our effort to encourage teachers to use technology to improve student learning. During the first summer training sessions, content specialists provided workshops focusing on specific curricular areas and technology tools, and during the next year, experts visited the schools and classrooms to observe, teach, and reflect with teachers.

Perhaps one of the most interesting uses of the Internet recently for educators is Global Schoolhouse Project. This project is one example of how the Internet can be used to transmit video for educational uses sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The participants in this "school without walls" were children ages 10 through 13 from four geographically distant schools--Jefferson Junior High School in Oceanside California; Cedar Bluff Middle School in Knoxville, Tennessee; Longbranch Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia; and Oldfield House School in Hampton, United Kingdom. As part of their studies, the students spent six weeks prior to the event studying watershed pollution in their local areas. The curriculum was created by the FrEDMail Foundation (FrEdMail stands for Free Educational Mail Network), a non-profit organization devoted to creating and fostering meaningful distance-based projects using computer networks. The students had an ambitious goal; to read Earth in the Balance by U.S. Vice President Al Gore and then conduct ground-water pollution studies in their communities. Beginning three weeks before the demonstration, the students met in two weekly videoconference rehearsals over the Internet to give progress reports and show video clips of their research. During the videoconferences, each group of students could see, in real time, all of the other groups and themselves on a quartered computer screen. During the Global Schoolhouse videoconference, a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation acted as a reflector, taking the video data from one site and reflecting it to the other sites. A second reflector, located at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sent copies of the video data to a viewing site in Vienna, Virginia, where guests could monitor the videoconference. The second reflector also sent the video data out over the Multicast Backbone, a collection of sites around the world that cooperate in global video and audio conferencing for various events.

The Star Schools Program is one of the largest and most successful public and private pertnerships for delivering distance education in the United States and around the world. Since 1988, the Star Schools grants have provided access to technology, telecommunications equipment and instructional programs for more than one million students, and provided professional development activities for more than 30,000 teachers and administrators in schools across the country and abroad. Instructional programs serve K-12 students and adult learners, including limited English-proficient students and disabled learners. The Stars Schools projects deliver distance education courses and services using many technologies including satellite delivery systems, open broadcasts, cable, and the Internet.

It is evident, technology is making a significant, positive impact on education. Important findings in these studies include educational technology as demonstrated a significant positive effect on achievement. Positive effects have been found for all major subject areas, in preschool through higher education, and for both regular education and special needs students. Evidence suggests that interactive video is especially effective when the skills and concepts to be learned have a visual component and when the software incorporates a research-based instructional design. Educational technology has been found to have positive effects on student attitudes toward learning and on student self-concept. Students felt more successful in school and were more motivated to learn and have increased self-confidence and self-esteem when using computer based instruction. This was true when technology allowed learners to control their own learning. The specific population, the software design, the teacher's role, how the students are grouped, and the level of student access to the technology influence the level of effectiveness of educational technology. Introducing technology into the learning environment has been shown to make learning more student-centered, to encourage cooperative learning, and to stimulate increased teacher/student interaction.

Despite the uncertainty of what technology and the 21^st century holds in store for education, one thing is for certain, education will have to further explore technology and telecommunications as a means to teach tomorrow's generation. The Internet can enhance classroom activities and professional development by creating global awareness, providing access to the latest information and enabling communications on a large scale, but you cannot just "throw the Internet into the classroom and expect for it to magically do all the work. It is still the responsibility of the teachers, administrators, parents, and the community to be the driving force for our students. All technology can do is provide motivational, enabling, empowering tools for our education, and not be our primary source of education.

References

URLs:

http://www.ed.gov/prog_info/StarSchools/

http://class.unt.edu

http://tft.merit.edu/nod4/lesson2.html

http://www.electronic-school.com

http://www.cusd.chico.k12.ca.us/~tgray/webness.html