New York City schools to advertisers: You help us buy computers.
We'll create a portal that gives you access to 1 million schoolchildren.
That was the deal city school board members unanimously approved
April 12, after a task force proposed a nine-year plan to distribute
laptop computers to all city schoolchildren in return for giving
companies space for their logos on a portal, or central web site.
The task force's idea is "to create ubiquitous, online access,
24 hours a day, seven days a week" for children, staff, parents,
and others in the school community, said Board Member Victoria
Streitfeld. She said the system would include e-mail addresses
for everyone from principals to custodians and would help bridge
the divide between technology haves and have-nots.
Board members said the proposal offered a means of financing
new technology that could not be paid for with tax dollars.
"This is a major shift in the ways we think about teaching and
learning and how we fund these activities," said Irving S. Hamer,
a board member who oversees the task force.
Offering advertising to corporate partners is the only way to
get their assistance in building and maintaining the system, said
William C. Thompson Jr., president of the board
of education.
Under the plan, laptops will be distributed each year to all
85,000 fourth-graders, beginning in 2001. After nine years, all
students in fourth through 12th grade would use their own computers.
Students would be able to click on commercial logos on the school
web site to buy products, with a portion of each sale going to
the board.
Streitfeld said the task force made it clear that curriculum
would be separate from the corporate logos.
The schools would expand Internet use in the classroom by creating
a portal that allows students to receive homework from teachers,
according to the New York Times. Teachers could also use the technology
to exchange lesson plans and talk to administrators and parents.
The plan is thought to be the first of its kind in the United
States, the Times reported.
Some education experts said that with traditional financing
sources limited, schools have to look to new avenues of funding.
"In a new economy, looking for new opportunities to raise capital
is just a survival mechanism," Cheryl S. Williams, director of
educational technology programs for the National School Boards
Association (NSBA), told the
Times.
The project is the latest in a series of corporate forays into
the schools. Ever since 1990, when Whittle Communications launched
Channel One and its 12-minute
daily news show for students, businesses have been increasingly
aggressive in trying to reach schoolchildren where they spend
much of their weekday hours. Critics say advertising has no place
in the schools; companies like Channel One say they are providing
a valuable service that students and teachers like.
Eleven years, ago, the New York Board of Regents banned Channel
One in the state, saying it exploited classroom time, the Times
noted. On April 7, however, Carl T. Hayden, chancellor of the
Board of Regents took a much different position on the computer
plan, saying it could help introduce students from low-income
families to new technologies. He said the proposal could also
help ease the state's teacher shortage by making classes available
over the Internet.
"In New York City, in particular, the teaching shortage is so
severe that one of the most crucial ways of dealing with it might
be through the use of technology," Hayden told the Times. "So
there may be a compelling need for something like this. But there
would have to be ironclad safeguards in place to make sure that
children are not exploited."
There are limits to what a paper airplane can teach about aerodynamics.
So students at Felix V. Festa Middle School in West Nyack, N.Y.,
spent much of the year building a helicopter. The project, drawing
on skills and concepts involving science, math, and technology,
impressed Hearlihy & Co. in Springfield, Ohio, so much that
the educational products company awarded teacher Alan G. Horowitz
a $2,000 grant, which he said would "go toward getting the helicopter
up in the sky." None of his students would be allowed to fly the
craft, he said, but he was taking flying lessons.
E-commerce comes to school
The San Juan, Calif., school district spends $153 million a
year on a wide range of goods, from pens and paper to computers
and landscaping supplies. But because the district's five-person
purchasing staff processes more than 17,000 requests a year, there
was little time to hunt for bargains.
"It's highly unlikely for [us] to call around town on a $1,200
purchase just to save $50 or $60," said Mike Kovalchik, senior
business director for the California district. "It's just not
efficient."
Now, better deals might be in store for overburdened school-purchasing
officials like Kovalchik. A proliferation of e-business companies
-- serving as middlemen between school districts and vendors --
are offering school districts a chance to hunt for sweeter deals
without much effort. The ever-evolving list of e-businesses includes
Epylon.com, Simplexis.com,
Shop2gether.com, eschoolmall.com,
DemandStar.com, and Way2Bid.com.
Schools spend from 5 to 8 percent of their total budgets purchasing
supplies and equipment, according to the Association of School
Business Officials International. With public school expenditures
totaling $335 billion in 1998-99, according to the National Education
Association, that's $16 to $26 billion. Add to those figures the
costs of purchasing non-tangibles such as insurance and services,
and the figure can reach as high as $85 billion for public and
private elementary and secondary education, according to investment
analysts.
Given the considerable value of this market -- plus the fact
that most large private enterprises have successfully captured
the power of the Internet to reduce purchasing costs -- it's hardly
surprising that e-commerce is making forays into public education.
Matt Sanders, a market analyst for Forrester Research Inc. in
Cambridge, Mass., said: "To the extent that districts receive
improved services at lower costs, [e-commerce] will be a huge
win for school districts."
San Juan, for example, has turned to San Francisco-based Epylon.com.
Like the other e-commerce start-ups, Eplyon.com offers a place
where school administrators can find many of the supplies they
need, compare prices, and order immediately. More than 500 school
districts have already signed up.
Epylon.com won't charge school districts to use the site. Instead,
the company plans to make money by charging suppliers a transaction
fee. This should, in theory, save school administrators time and
money and speed up delivery of goods.
Epylon.com chairman Kelly Blanton said his company is tailored
to help schools that struggle to spend limited funds effectively.
"I always got a dollar to do a $1.25 job," said Blanton, a school
administrator for 40 years and former superintendent of the Kern
County schools in California.
Lamar Alexander, former U.S. secretary of education and Republican
presidential candidate, is now chairman of San Francisco-based
Simplexis.com, one of Epy-lon.com's competitors. "This is probably
the most promising area for saving real dollars to ever come along
to public education," Alexander told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Some school districts spend up to $120 in administrative costs
for each purchase order they process, Alexander told the paper,
and he contended that Simplexis.com could cut that to as low as
$25 per purchase.
Simplexis.com -- currently being piloted in Glendale, Calif.
-- and other e-commerce companies claim they can cut costs for
several reasons. To begin with, online automated purchasing forms
reduce paperwork and cut down on the costly errors that often
occur with manual input. Up-to-the-minute online status reports
help track orders, picking up on problems before they become insurmountable.
Beyond this, the companies give school districts more opportunities
to combine orders so as to qualify for high-volume discounts.
Even some of the usual critics of corporate involvement in public
schools say e-commerce could serve schools well. But, in the same
breath, they say the Internet companies won't serve schools well
if they promote products directly to students.
Alex Molnar, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
and director of the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in
Education, said, "There's nothing inherently evil about e-commerce
... as long as there is no tie-in that touches students in some
kind of commercial come-on."
As an example, Molnar pointed to cases in which school districts
have purchased laptop computers for students. As part of the purchase
agreement, advertisements targeted at students appear on the laptop
screen. Districts that do not like this kind of "commercial come-on,"
Molnar advised, should make that clear to the e-commerce companies,
which will undoubtedly attract advertisers.
Young scientists launch space probes and plot rendezvous courses
with comets at the new Challenger
Learning Center of Greater Washington in Alexandria, Va. The
latest of 39 Challenger Learning Centers created by the families
of astronauts lost in the 1986 Challenger explosion, this one
serves as a flagship, developing new programs for engaging students
in math and science around the world.
New standards for tech ed
Technology education shouldn't be limited to what appears on
a computer screen, according to new national standards released
by the International Technology Education Association (ITEA)
in Reston, Va.
Standards for
Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology
starts by noting that the document "correctly does not focus unduly
on [computers and the Internet], which comprise only a small part
of our vast human-built world." Twenty standards, with benchmarks
at different grade levels, lay out what students should know about
the history, design, effects, and use of technologies ranging
from wheels to spaceships.
With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF)
and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
ITEA involved more than 4,000 educators, engineers, technologists,
and others in the three-year process of developing, drafting,
and reviewing the standards. When they were released in April,
many welcomed the new standards as a way of putting everyone on
the same page and infusing technology throughout the K-12 curriculum.
But others didn't see much chance of the standards being adopted
by states. "The current frenzy for testing and accountability
is so extreme that the idea of squeezing something else into the
core curriculum ... is highly unlikely," Stanford University Professor
Larry Cuban told Education Week.
The 20 standards include such statements as:
- Students will develop an understanding of the characteristics
and scope of technology.
- Students will develop an understanding of the core concepts
of technology.
- Students will develop an understanding of the relationships
among technologies and the connections between technology and
other fields of study.
- Students will develop an understanding of the cultural, social,
economic, and political effects of technology.
- Students will develop an understanding of the effects of
technology on the environment.
The 248-page report explaining the standards is available from
ITEA for $30.
Kids are piloting spaceships, planting vegetable gardens, and
handling a pulsating human heart -- all without leaving Abraham
Lincoln School in Oak Park, Ill.
Lincoln is the first school in the nation to house a semipermanent
virtual-reality installation. In a small room just off the school
media center, teachers and students crowd around the Immersadesk,
a creation of the University of Illinois (UIC)
at Chicago's Electronics
Visualization Laboratory that projects images on what looks
like a cross between a large-screen TV and a drafting table. Students
wear special goggles that make the images appear three-dimensional
while a teacher uses a handheld wand to make things happen --
to land a spacecraft, for instance, or slice open a pulsating
heart.
It's all part of a three-year project, funded by the National
Science Foundation, aimed at discovering how virtual learning
can be used to improve education.
"History is full of grandiose promises regarding the impact
of technology on schools," said UIC computer science professor
Thomas Moher, a former member of the District 97 school board
in Oak Park. "We're working with an advanced technology that is
today well outside the budget of school systems. While we believe
that virtual reality may have benefits for learners, we need to
pinpoint where those benefits might outweigh costs."
Other schools have used virtual reality in the past, but only
on a temporary basis. Researchers said they hoped the length of
this project will allow students and teachers to get past the
novelty of the technology, so its realistic effect on student
learning can be measured.
"We're working very hard to work against the hype," Moher told
the Chicago Sun-Times. "We want to get to the point where kids
are kind of bored with the technology itself."
But six months after the Immersadesk was installed at Lincoln,
kids were still excited. "It's cool that we can do schoolwork,
and it's not like we have to just write down on paper," sixth-grader
Felicia Bridgers told the Sun-Times. "It's awesome."
Teachers were impressed, too. "There's a lot of excitement around
here about this," Kathy Madura told Electronic School. "It's something
else for a teacher's bag of tricks, and it helps us tap in to
students' imaginations."
For a flat-screen view of virtual learning projects, visit the
Tele-Immersive Learning
Enviornments.
WHO'S ONLINE?
You might think the answer is, "Everyone." But the National
Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
reports otherwise. In schools with Internet access, NCES says,
teachers are more likely than students to have access to e-mail,
news groups, resource location services, and the World Wide Web.
And that goes for public and private schools alike.
Young women are steering away from high-tech careers not because
the work is hard but because they think the field is boring and
antisocial, a new study
suggests.
The report from the American Association of University Women
(AAUW), released in
April, said that among high-tech career paths, "girls outnumbered
boys only in their enrollment in word-processing classes, arguably
the 1990s version of typing."
The study's authors found that boys were more likely than girls
to have computers in their bedrooms and more likely to be sent
by their parents to computer camps.
"Instead of trying to make girls fit into the existing computer
culture, the computer culture must become more inviting to girls,"
said Sherry Turkle, professor of sociology at MIT and a cochair
of the AAUW Commission on Technology, Gender, and Teacher Education.
The association's researchers based their findings on Internet
surveys of 900 teachers and gathered comments from 70 middle schoool
and high school female students in Washington, D.C., and its suburbs.
"They're not phobic about computer technology, but disenchanted
by it," said Pamela Haag, research director for the AAUW Education
Foundation. "What they are saying to us is: 'We can do this, but
we don't want to.'"
The report, "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer
Age," elaborates on a 1998 report by the foundation that found
girls were closing in on boys in math and science performance.
The new report shows that women receive less than 28 percent of
computer science bachelor's degrees, down from 37 percent in 1984.
Only 20 percent of high-tech jobs are held by women, according
to the report.
The persistent "computer geek" stereotype and the lack of high-profile
female role models contribute to the trend, according to Haag.
"Their term was that they want to see a female Bill Gates," she
said.
The report recommends creating computer games that involve strategies
and real-life problems to attract girls, as well as revising computer
science courses to make them more interesting. Parents and educators
should help girls imagine themselves early in life as designers
and producers of new technology. They should engage girls in "tinkering"
activities that can stimulate deeper interest in technology. Teachers
need to make the public face of women in computing more real and
less stereotypical. Girls tend to imagine that computer professionals
and those who work with information technology live in a solitary,
antisocial world.
It also recommends that educators set a new benchmark for gender
equity that emphasizes computer fluency -- girls' mastery of analytical
skills, computer concepts, and ability to imagine uses for technology
across a range of problems and subjects.
"When it comes to today's computer culture, the bottom line
is that while more girls are on the train, they aren't the ones
driving," said Haag. "To get girls 'under the hood' of technology,
they need to see that it gets them where they want to go. And
for a large part of that population, the process must start in
the classroom."
 STILL
THE BIG APPLE
Apple Computer is still
No. 1 in sales in the U.S. education market, according to International
Data Corp. (IDC). In its education
market report for the fourth quarter of 1999, IDC showed Apple
leading in overall U.S. education sales with a 30.6 percent market
share. The market research firm also ranked Apple on top for the
entire year of 1999, with a 23.6 percent market share. Market
analysts attributed the firm's widening lead to the introduction
of such popular products as the iBook,
iMac, and iMovie.
Parents trust the Internet
Parents believe the Internet is safe, and they want their children
to use it, especially for educational activities, according to
a survey
conducted by the National School Boards Foundation (NSBF),
with support from Microsoft
and the Children's Television Workshop.
"Safe and Smart: Research and Guidelines for Children's Use
of the Internet" is based on interviews with a random sample consisting
of 1,735 parents of children ages 2 to 17, and 601 children between
the ages of 9 and 17, from the same households.
"This survey gives school leaders and families a new, shared
understanding of the increasing importance and value of the Internet
in children's education," said Anne L. Bryant, executive director
of the National School Boards Association. "Based on these findings,
we believe schools and families should work together to guide
children to good content on the Internet, both in school and at
home."
According to the study, parents trust their children's use of
the Internet and generally believe it's a safe place. Most parents
forego the "watchdog" role for a "guide" role, adopting a common-sense,
balanced approach to their children's Internet use. Parents monitor
the sites their children visit, limit their time spent online,
and set other rules about usage. (Sixty-seven percent of parents
surveyed said their role is as a guide to good content.)
The study also found that girls use the Internet as much as
boys (50 percent of 9- to 12-year-old girls are online, compared
with 46 percent of boys; 73 percent of 13- to 17-year-old girls
use the Internet, contrasted with 70 percent of boys).
The study suggests that schools have an opportunity to help
narrow the gap between the technology haves and have-nots. Already
schools provide significant Internet access for students who otherwise
would not have access. (In families with incomes of less than
$40,000, 76 percent of 9- to 17-year-olds who use the Internet
say that they log on at school; in African American families,
80 percent of 9- to 17-year-olds say they log on at school.) The
main reason cited by parents for buying home computers and obtaining
home Internet access is their children's learning or education
(45 percent).
The guidelines recommend:
- Pay as much attention to highlighting good content as restricting
bad content.
- Develop a plan to help schools, teachers, and parents educate
children about safe, responsible Internet use. For example,
put computers in rooms that are shared, teach children not to
give out personal information, and participate in an online
safety program.
- Foster appropriate use of the Internet among preschoolers
and other young children.
- Help teachers, parents, and children use the Internet more
effectively for learning. For example, suggest education-related
web sites for parents and children to visit together, offer
after-school tutoring online, and provide teacher training to
integrate the Internet into lessons.
- Use the Internet to communicate more effectively with parents
and students and stimulate parent involvement. For example,
post exemplary student work online with teacher comments, create
a school web site, and encourage parents to e-mail teachers.
- Engage the community by encouraging computer and Internet
training and hosting forums to discuss children's use of technology
for education.
BIG SPENDERS
U.S. school districts spent $6.7 billion on educational technology
during the 1998-99 school year, up from $5.4 billion in 1997,
reports Quality Education Data (QED),
a Denver-based research firm. This growth -- a 24 percent increase
-- is the highest percentage increase since QED began tracking
ed tech budgets a decade ago. Districts spent some 43 percent
of their technology budgets on hardware in 1998-99, averaging
$60.56 per student. That number is projected to drop this year
to $46.98, or 35 percent of budget. Increased spending is projected
in networks, software, peripherals, and professional development.
TECH SUPPORT STRATEGIES
Want to control the costs of tech support? Take a lesson from
more than 120 technologically advanced districts and rely on teachers,
librarians, and other nontechnology staff to provide support.
Then, you might limit the ability of teachers and students to
modify the way computers are configured and take steps to standardize
the model of computer used throughout your district. Those were
the strategies cited most frequently in a survey conducted last
fall by the Consortium for School Networking and the Education
Technology Programs of the National School Boards Association
(NSBA). The districts, members
of NSBA's Technology Leadership Network (TLN),
also said they rely on students to provide support as a way of
controlling costs.
E-Wire is prepared with Associated Press (AP) reports.
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