Razzle-Dazzle District

'Morphed' movie images enliven learning in Illinois

By Mary Holden

Mary Holden is a writer in Chicago.

My grade school days in the 1970s were hardly ancient times. The nuns wore pantsuits, not habits, and we sometimes watched a video in class. But a visit to the library media center at Forest View Elementary School in Mount Prospect, Ill., makes me feel like I did my lessons on clay tablets.

"Don't forget to save," Dennis Berens warns a fourth-grade class as he crosses to three girls seated at a Macintosh computer. They are preparing a multimedia slide-show presentation on gemstones, complete with voice-overs, graphic transitions that look like exploding bubbles, color backgrounds, and digitized hand-drawn pictures and photographs. "It's not the old push-the-pencil-across-the-paper thing," says Berens, who directs the media center, pointing out the obvious. The computers "make kids really want to come down and do this. . . . It's exciting for them. . . . They just eat it up."

Community Consolidated School District 59 (K-8; enrollment 6,400) began a major effort in computer technology about five years ago, Berens explains. Supported by the growing tax base of Chicago's industrial suburbs, as well as by state and corporate grants, District 59 has rapidly become one of the leading users of computer technology in the state--and was honored for that achievement last year by the National Education Association.

District schools have as many as four computers per classroom and banks of computers in every library. Rooms in renovated buildings have large overhead monitors that teachers use for "electronic chalkboards." Teachers in nonrenovated buildings can wheel oversized monitors into their rooms. A repertoire of software, including Kid Pix (Broderbund Software), Hyper Studio (Roger Wagner Publishing), MediaText (Wings for Learning), and PowerPoint (Microsoft), and tools such as laser disc movies aid instruction in every subject and every grade.

Since July, the district has had its own Internet node, a server that connects it to information resources around the world. And links between the server and all 13 schools, through a wide-area network, are expected to be completed this spring.

Behind District 59's plunge into cyberspace is Associate Superintendent for Instruction Robert Bortnick, an avuncular ex-college teacher with a contagious enthusiasm for computers. Bortnick's love for computers began 30 years ago as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. "I was taught by a 12-year-old," he says.

But the district's focus, Bortnick emphasizes, is on using technology as a learning tool, not on teaching how to use technology per se. "[We're] talking about giving kids a tool which they can use to leverage and extend their learning capabilities," he says. "That's what I think is going to distinguish kids who are competitive in a global information society."

The need to equip kids for a high-tech future might be why Bortnick thinks the district should spend a lot more on technology than the $400,000 it budgeted last year. That amount, at less than 1 percent of the total district budget (which averages $7,000 per pupil) is "too little," he says. And further growth will require tough policy choices, because changes in state tax laws will make it hard to raise school spending in the years ahead.

Yet Bortnick does have a few funding cards up his sleeve--corporate and state grants that added $250,000 to technology coffers last year and helped finance, among other things, a new technology training center. Grantors are impressed by the district's demonstrated commitment to technology, Bortnick says.

That commitment is multifaceted, because all the new equipment wouldn't mean much without staff training, long-term planning, creative teachers able to work the technology into the curriculum, and a commitment to using the computers as a means, not an end, Bortnick says. "Our success in part is due to the fact that we're really not interested in the boxes and the wires; it's what you can do to help deliver instruction." Certain teachers have "really provided leadership," he adds, some of them by creating innovative computer learning programs in the days when the district had only a few computers.

And the planning component also has deep roots. Bortnick says planning for the district's current level of usage took several years and included extensive input from a citizens' committee. John Prusko, who teaches science at Elk Grove Junior High School and provides technical support for the district, agrees that planning is a key to the success of a large-scale computer initiative. "You need a five-year plan, you need community support," Prusko says.

Jacquelyn Karlin, a kindergarten teacher at the John Jay School in Mount Prospect, underlines the importance of staff training: "If you don't train your teachers to do it, they're not going to do it. I had time to create these [programs for class], and I had the training. If we didn't have that, we could have the computers and not do anything."

Bortnick admits that staff development started late and has been spotty. "A lot of training, unfortunately, is [a] one-shot deal," he says, "and while that creates awareness I don't know that it always creates competence." To tackle the training problem, the district has introduced a variety of programs. One is an annual summer program that trains children in creating multimedia projects and provides a staff development opportunity for teachers. "They get training, and [they] work with students, and afterward they feel really comfortable," Bortnick says. Staff members also attend programs after school at the district's new training center; and individual schools set aside time each week for training during school hours. In addition, teachers can look for help on the district's home page.

Heroes and heroines

None of that training pays off, of course, until it reaches the classroom. One program for junior high students uses laser discs to study an ancient idea: What makes a hero or heroine? The students start by writing an essay about someone they consider a hero or heroine--usually they choose a sports figure or a movie star, Bortnick says. Students then compare and contrast several main characters from classical literature, such as Prometheus and Antigone, and modern sources.

"The finale is, we take them through the motion picture High Noon, by looking at scenes and judging those scenes in terms of the criteria that [have] been developed by reading classical literature," Bortnick says. Using a computer and a laser disc, the teacher shifts easily from scene to scene. By this time, students' ideas about what is heroic have advanced far beyond their original essays.

Media center director Berens explains the other end of the spectrum--how first-graders at Forest View Elementary study the concept of "community." Students take home a school camcorder, and their parents use it to videotape objects in the community, such as a tall building. The teacher records each child's voice describing the object, and the class collection of video clips is compiled into a presentation that is shown to the students.

Teachers also combine commercial products with presentations developed in-house. Karlin, for example, teaches her kindergartners about language and music using a commercial Pocahontas laser disc and the lyrics to the movie's songs stored on a floppy disk. She projects the lyrics on an overhead monitor and highlights words with a computer mouse, or she creates an electronic marker to follow along with the voice on the laser disc. She can return easily to a certain word or phrase, a feat that would be cumbersome with a tape recorder.

Karlin, who has taught kindergarten for 25 years and has written her own software programs for the past five years, believes the computer lets her be more creative. And the multimedia capabilities, she says, help children who learn in different ways: "It's audio, it's video, it's tactile, they can dance to it. Everyone learns in a different way, and this kind of brings it all together."

Students at many grade levels use popular software such as Kid Pix for school projects, like the slide show on gems. Teachers put together their own multimedia presentations. When Prusko taught about atomic energy, for example, he could show a laser disc film of an A-bomb being loaded onto an airplane. "I have to keep the kids' attention," says Prusko, who has taught for 29 years. "For all practical purposes, we're competing with all the electronic equipment they have at home."

Laser discs and high-capacity computers allow students even to manipulate movie images. Bortnick demonstrates a new scene he created for Star Wars with the help of some students: It ends with Luke Skywalker's face morphing into his own. "I always wanted to be Luke Skywalker," he jokes.

Students and teachers use the Internet to find information and to download images for projects. But teachers arguably have less time for "surfing," so last summer, a group of teachers compiled a "hot list" of good-quality World Wide Web sites in 60 or 70 curriculum areas--such as Native American studies. The list helps teachers jump swiftly to detailed information, for example, on Native American literature, culture, and history. Other sites, such as the home page of Chicago's Field Museum, have terrific student activities there for the taking, Bortnick says.

Students and teachers also communicate with other schools. For example, through a program sponsored by the National Geographic Society, third-graders work via the Internet with students around the United States on solving the nation's waste disposal problem.

District 59 has begun using the Internet for video conferences. "We talk to people all over the world--young, old, kids in school, people in college," says Stephanie Shintani, age 15. Shintani took part in that activity before she graduated from District 59; now a high school sophomore, she still hangs around the administration building, helping Bortnick prepare multimedia presentations. She says she enjoys researching and preparing school projects on a computer as opposed to using a book and a binder. "It's a lot different; you learn, I think, a lot more," she says. "There are so many more resources. . . . You get to use different media, you can use sound and pictures--it gets you into the project more."

District 59 educators, like school leaders elsewhere, are having to come up with solutions to the new problems the Internet raises. For example, the district keeps children away from material that isn't educational and age-appropriate by using "firewalls" and by granting Internet access as a privilege, Bortnick says. The district also chooses not to carry news groups--public on-line discussion groups that in some cases feature pornography--on its server.

Nothing is foolproof, however, and a few students have come across a site inadvertently, Bortnick says. He did so himself, when he tried to find a picture of fluffy yellow chicks for a kindergarten teacher. On an Internet search program he typed "chicks" and came up with the other kind. "I'm glad I didn't do it in front of the kindergarten class," he laughs, adding that the district is looking at software that will block out additional unwanted material.

A key advantage of the wide-area network is that teachers have easier access to reference materials. Formerly, to draw from the district's collection of laser discs and videos, which are stored at the central office, teachers looked up items in a big yellow book, completed an order slip, and sent it in. Now the collection is searched and the request made by computer, Bortnick says, and the use of the reference materials has increased "dramatically."

Teachers' comfort level with the technology is mixed, says Berens. "For the most part, everyone is very accepting of it." He underlines the benefit of ongoing training programs and support staff who help with problems. Still, he says, some teachers feel overwhelmed by the amount of new technology and information. Karlin, on the other hand, doesn't think teachers are uncomfortable, just at different levels of proficiency. "Some people are creating; some people are using the programs that exist," Karlin says. "Everybody knows how to use it. Everybody uses it in a way [he or she is] comfortable with."

Of course, worrying about people's comfort level is a condition that other districts with fewer resources would love to have. Bortnick advises that technology costs less than some schools think. A modem costs under $200; high-quality CD-ROMS can be had for $19 to $49; and prices of most kinds of hardware continue to fall.

Considering how important computers have become to the world, Bortnick says schools should be rethinking how they spend their money. "Do we really need to invest as much as we have in the past in a textbook that's going to be dated pretty immediately?" he asks. "Do I have to spend the kind of money that libraries have spent . . . for subscription materials and reference materials?" Certainly, District 59 is actively addressing those questions--and its priorities will never be quite the same.