Company's offer raises questions
about commercials in schools
 A
high-tech company offers schools across the country thousands
of dollars in free computer equipment, Internet access, and technical
support. In return, students can see the firm's logo on their
computer interface and click on icons that link to other advertisers.
Is this a great deal -- or a bribe? A fairy tale come true --
or a cautionary fable? Is ZapMe!
-- the California company making the offer -- a benevolent Santa
or a corporate predator?
It's been called both.
"When I first heard about this, I asked the ZapMe! people, 'Are
you sure your offices are in San Ramon and not the North Pole?'"
Theodore F. Maddock told the New York Times. Maddock is
technology coordinator for Mt. Diablo High School, which serves
a largely poor and minority student body and has signed up for
the program.
"ZapMe! is a corporate predator," said Gary Ruskin, director
of Commercial Alert,
a new organization started by consumer advocate Ralph Nader. "Advertising
for kids is not an acceptable activity -- particularly in schools."
ZapMe! has been testing its program in about a dozen San Francisco
Bay Area schools and is now taking it national. At press time,
it was planning to connect as many as 500 schools by the end of
1998 and had received inquiries from more than 8,000.
The company's package includes a high-speed satellite connection
on the school's rooftop, a lab with 15 personal computers, and
a server and laser printer. In addition, ZapMe! provides training
for students and teachers and support for installation, maintenance,
and upgrades.
"We established the ZapMe! netspace because we believe that
students will be better prepared for their future if they have
access to these critical learning tools," said company President
Frank J. Vigil. "Most schools couldn't even afford computer labs
or Internet access at all, let alone installation, training, and
support. Until now."
"It's creating a situation of second-class [computer] access"
for less-wealthy schools that must accept advertising because
they cannot afford technology on their own, said Jeffrey Chester,
executive director of the Center
for Media Education, in Washington, D.C. He said advertisers
want to tap the huge home market that schoolchildren represent.
"It's really a digital Pandora's Box we're opening."
Chester said that advertisers will soon will be able to collect
market data on individual students in order to more closely target
their sales. But Vigil said his company has no such plans.
"ZapMe! will not offer information from any individual user
to anyone," Vigil said. "We have a strict privacy protection policy
to ensure this."
Vigil also objected to comparisons to Channel One, the company
that provides about 12,000 schools with free televisions and video
equipment in exchange for the right to show 10 minutes of a daily
television news show and two minutes of commercials.
"The ZapMe! netspace is very different from Channel One," Vigil
said. "ZapMe! is not in the classroom. ZapMe! is not television,
and ZapMe! does not force students to watch or do anything.
"The ZapMe! netspace is an interactive, engaging, learning environment
for kids that, unlike Channel One, opens up lines of communication
between students, parents, and teachers."
That explanation doesn't satisfy Merede Graham, associate director
of the Center for Commercial-Free
Public Education, in Oakland, Calif.
"We, as an organization, don't make a distinction between good
and bad advertising," Graham said. "There's bad and worse. ...
The question is: Should there be advertising in school at all?"
Government aims to wire Native American schools
 Many
of the children come from homes without running water or electricity.
Some live in remote villages and must be bused up to three hours
a day to get to and from school.
All the more reason to connect them to the Internet, say educators
involved in Access Native America,
a school wiring project launched last May by the Bureau
of Indian Affairs. The government aims to link all 185 bureau-financed
schools to the Internet.
"We are very, very rural," Theresa A. Kedelty, principal of
Cottonwood Day School in Arizona, told the New York Times.
"We have small communities, and they don't have a lot of the amenities
you encounter in the city. To be able to have T1 lines connect
to our schools is a major event."
Cottonwood lies on a Navajo nation reserve about a three-hour
drive from Flagstaff. Not one of the 242 students in the K-8 school
has a computer at home, the Times reported. But at school,
the students can use e-mail to talk to Pueblo children in New
Mexico and Choctaw students in Mississippi.
The program has received widespread praise, even by those who
are suspicious of technology's supposed benefits for the classroom.
"Even most skeptics, including me, agree there are at least
strong sets of anecdotal evidence that kids in isolated areas
tend to benefit more from computers in school than kids in general,"
William L. Rukeyser, coordinator of Learning in the Real World,
a California-based organization that questions classroom technology,
told the Times.
In addition to helping students, educators in the Gila
River (Ariz.) Indian Community Schools use the Internet for
adult education and might eventually use it for tribal business
as well, said Keith Franklin, system administrator for the schools.
Eddie Garcia, a junior at Tohono O'odham High School in Mesa,
Ariz., helped wire his school's computer connections. His experience
has convinced him that he can have a career in high technology.
"I've learned that there are a lot of people buying computers,"
he said. "And I've helped set some of them up in their homes."
The high school has enhanced an 11th-grade English class taught
by a University of Arizona professor by allowing students to communicate
with the teacher and submit work through e-mail.
Sylvia Ortiz, a senior, has used the Internet to get information
about the University of Arizona's academic programs and to apply
for admission. She also looks online for books she needs for class
assignments and sends e-mail to her brother at the university.
The technology program has also helped Tohono O'odham High School
enhance its foreign exchange program with Russian students.
"We were online directly to Russia before the visit," said Paul
Brown, who teaches computer courses. "And when the Russians were
here, they used it too."
Laptops boost learning, study says 
Kids who have full-time access to laptop computers show better
critical and creative thinking, produce higher quality work, and
are more motivated and interested in core academic subjects.
Those are the conclusions of a new study, "Powerful
Tools for Schooling," the second report in a three-year evaluation
of the Anytime
Anywhere Learning programs sponsored by Microsoft Corp. and
Toshiba America Information Systems Inc.
The study, conducted by San Francisco-based education researcher
Saul Rockman, involved more than 150 teachers and more than 450
students from 20 schools where students have 24-hour access to
laptop computers, which are integrated into classroom instruction.
After analyzing written surveys, shadow studies, and interviews
with teachers and students, Rockman concluded that laptops "may
be particularly well suited to supporting technology's promise
of radically changing teaching and learning."
Among his findings:
* The students who had access to laptops spent more time engaged
in collaborative work and project-based instruction than their
peers who did not use laptops.
* Teachers named writing as the academic outcome or skill that
was most directly affected by the use of the laptops. Their students
did more writing more often and spent more time on research, the
teachers said.
* Shadow studies discovered that roles changed in laptop classes:
Teachers spent more time consulting and conferencing with students
and less time lecturing, and students worked more creatively and
more independently.
* Laptop students were more likely to apply problem-solving
and critical-thinking skills.
Rockman also concluded that laptops extend the school day. Seventh-graders
using laptops spent 10 times as much out-of-school computer time
on schoolwork as seventh-graders who did not use laptops but had
desktop computers at home.
Hackers' punishment fits their crime
Makaveli and TooShort won't be seeing much unsupervised computer
time in the near future.
The monikers are code names for two Cloverdale, Calif., cyberhackers
who cracked several components of the U.S. military computer system,
forcing a message to be sent to President Clinton about the potential
for Iraqi saboteurs.
But instead of being secret agents or enemy spies, Makaveli
and TooShort were students, ages 16 and 17, who learned their
computer lessons a bit too well.
U.S. District Court Judge Maxine Chesney has sentenced the youths
to three years probation, requiring them to attend school but
barring them from access to computer modems or working on a computer
out of sight from a teacher, librarian, employer, or probation
officer.
The boys' attorney, Chris Andrian, said the youths have been
sufficiently frightened and humiliated that they don't want to
run back into the arms of the law.
The teens did not have malevolent intentions, said Andrian.
"I call it the Mount Everest effect," he said. "They did it to
prove they could."
The youths had penetrated unclassified, but protected, networks
run by the U.S. Air Force and the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, which is involved with the development of sophisticated
research for nuclear weapons.
The ease with which the hackers accessed these computers demonstrated
how vulnerable the U.S. computer system had become, officials
said, adding that the boys' activities had the potential to disrupt
military communications throughout the world.
Career goal: network administrator
Setting up computer networking classes in your secondary school
system has never been easier, thanks to the launch of several
programs run by the folks who make the goods.
Among the options are offerings by Microsoft, Cisco Systems,
and, most recently, 3Com.
Launched this past fall, NetPrep
is managed and funded by 3Com
and several partners. The initiative has developed curriculum
for secondary schools with an eye toward giving four semesters
of training for students interested in pursuing a career in networking.
The curriculum is "platform neutral," meaning that it does not
favor a specific vendor.
A parallel system operates in conjunction with community colleges,
providing advanced study for high school graduates.
The curriculum includes a basic course on networking fundamentals,
followed by semesters on local and wide-area networks and then
network architecture.
Graduates receive independent industry standard certification.
Students are trained to be entry-level management information
system managers and are prepared to go on to other post-secondary
training.
The program has some strong backers, including Boston Mayor
Tom Menino, who said it addresses "a critical need in the high-tech
industry while giving students the skills to compete in tomorrow's
workforce."
Eric Benhamou, 3Com chairman and CEO, said the program is based
on standards, not favoritism of a specific product line. The goal,
he said, is to give schools "the opportunity to provide their
students with a skill that is in high demand and addresses a serious
challenge to our continued economic growth."
Already out there is the Microsoft
Authorized Academic Training Program, which now reaches 1,500
schools and 200,000 students. The goal: train students in Microsoft
networking nuance.
Cisco Systems, through its Cisco
Networking Academies program, has a year-old effort that focuses
on its systems, with similar goals. So far, Cisco operates 662
local academies in 49 states.
Kids build savings for Pennsylvania school
If you're looking for a way to improve the student-computer
ratio in your schools, the answer to your wishes might be staring
you right in the face: Have students build the computers themselves.
That's what they're doing at the Columbia-Montour Vo-Tech school
in Bloomsburg, Pa. It not only saves money for the school, but
it offers the students an invaluable learning experience -- with
a notably practical twist.
With the help of a grant from Intel Corp., the students are
building 60 computers for their classmates to use. The school
received 60 motherboards and Pentium processors through the Intel
program, which aims to achieve a 5 to 1 student-computer ratio
in the nation's public schools. The other components necessary
for assembly were purchased with school funds.
All in all, the school will save roughly $38,000 by having the
students build the computers.
Bill Shultz, a junior in the school's electronics program, said
it took a while to figure out how all the disparate parts fit
together. But already, he's built five computers with his own
hands.
"This is just a great learning opportunity," said Tom Allen,
the school's administrative director. "It's as live and hands-on
as it's going to get. We love to have students taking an active
role in building our school."
Online, not on the couch
 Today's
kids would rather be web jockeys than couch potatoes, according
to a survey by the Family
Education Network. By a slender margin of 47 percent to 42
percent, kids said they prefer using the Internet to watching
television -- not bad for a new medium going up against the ever-present
boob tube. The survey found that 85 percent surf for topics of
interest such as hobbies or events; 73 percent look up school-related
information; 68 percent use e-mail; 54 percent play games; and
48 percent take part in chat rooms. Average daily time spent on
the web: up to four hours.
Congress watch
Before adjourning this past fall, the House
and Senate passed -- and President Clinton signed -- an omnibus
measure now known as P.L. 105-277, which includes an amended version
of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The measure requires
parental consent or notice before children 12 and under can give
any personally identifiable information to commercial web sites.
Omitted from the bill: a proposal that schools and libraries install
and use filtering and blocking software as a condition of receiving
federal funds or E-Rate discounts.
Honor your students
 Every
school's got 'em: techno-savvy kids who live and breathe computers
and, not so incidentally, value academic success, service, and
leadership. Now you can honor them by establishing a chapter of
the American Technology Honor
Society. Cosponsored by the National Association of Secondary
School Principals and the Technology Student Association, the
honor society has grown since its inception in 1995 to include
more than 350 chapters in 46 states.
Challenge your teachers
 ThinkQuest
for Tomorrow's Teachers will give out
more than $500,000 in cash awards to teams of K-12 teachers, prospective
teachers, and higher ed faculty to build web-based education materials
for K-12 classrooms or teacher preparation programs. So think
big -- and think fast: The deadline for application's is March
31, 1999.
E-Wire is prepared with Associated Press (AP) reports.
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