For many of the survivors of the category EF-5 tornado that struck Joplin, Mo., in May of 2011, the aftermath presented more than just the necessity of starting over. It also presented a chance to think differently about what they wanted for their city.
One example of how the city altered its course was the public school system. The tornado destroyed five of the Joplin School District’s schools and damaged another five. When the district began rebuilding the destroyed schools, including its only high school, administrators decided tomake a clean break from traditional textbooks and instead adopted a “one-toone” philosophy. It assigned a laptop computer to each student and moved its entire educational content online, said Klista Rader, the district’s director of information and implementation of technology.
“Although lessons don’t have to be Web-based, they are a great deal of the time,” Rader said. “If the tornado had never happened, I don’t know if we’d be one-to-one yet, but we already knew it was the direction we wanted to go.” The decision to move toward an education modelthat’s based mostly on computerized media has led to other innovative decisions. Earlier this week, Rader informed the Joplin Board of Education that the first of six school buses outfitted with wireless connectivity devices will be rotated into regular use soon, after testing of the system’s Internet filters is complete.
Rader said the buses are each outfitted with two cellular data cards, and the devices allow users to access the Internet in the same way smartphones do.
Rader said installing wireless connectivity will help not only students who have long daily bus commutes to and from their homes in rural areas, but also students involved in athletics and other programs that require them to miss classroom time on a semiregular basis.
“In the past, these students could ask their teachers what they were going to miss, and they’d be told to read page whatever in their textbooks,” Rader said. “Now they can electronically attend class. They don’t have to ‘miss’ class anymore.”
Rader said the wireless hardware cost the district about $8,000. It will cost monthly service fees of about $90 for each of the six buses once they are in operation.
The increasingly widespread adoption of technology in classrooms represents a region-wide shift in thinking about how educational content is transmitted to students, from the wholesale delivery of facts to an emphasis on analysis and application of those facts for the purpose of collaboration and problem-solving.
Zena Featherston Marshall, a spokesman for Fort Smith Public Schools, said her district has more than 10,000 mini-laptop computers in use throughout all its schools. Featherston Marshall said technology in Fort Smith schools hasbeen specifically funded, in part, through property tax millages for more than two decades.
Samantha Hall, supervisor of professional development at the Rogers Center, one of three learning centers in the Fort Smith district, said the district has spent five years training selected teachers to become fluent in integrating technology and getting the district up to a one-to-one standard.
George Lieux is a technology integration specialist with the Fort Smith district, helping teachers integrate technological devices into lesson plans.
“It’s really a whole shift in the way kids learn,” Lieux said. “They have access to so much information now. They’re gathering their facts in minutes, not days.”
“Also, it’s not just individual lessons, but a movement to problem-based, challenge-based learning,” Lieux said. “They can research things so quickly - it’s no longer the business of going to the library and researching for hours - they can spend all their time synthesizing and analyzing.”
Mary Ley, a spokesman for the Bentonville School District, along with Featherston Marshall and administrators in other Arkansas school districts contacted for this article, said adopting wireless connectivity, or Wi-Fi, on school buses seems unlikely in the nearfuture.
“I don’t see it happening, just because of cost,” Ley said, referring to the prospect of installing Wi-Fi accessibility in the district’s bus fleet. “We’re just trying to keep our fleet going and keep up with growth.”
“We have done a lot with technology,” Ley said. “We’ve made all the schools wireless, even the older buildings. The kids can bring their own devices to school, and we’ve raised the bandwidth by a ton.”
Andy Mayes, the Bentonville district’s directorof technology, said the current Internet bandwidth coming through the district’s technology center is about 300 megabits per second and that the district will be quadrupling that to 1.2 gigabits per second within a year.
Typical household Internet service connections provide between five and 50 megabits per second of bandwidth.
Mayes said a portion of the district’s bandwidth expenditures is funded through the Arkansas Department of Education. The district’s out-of-pocket expenses for bandwidth connectivity amount to about $3,000 each month after discounts through the federal E-Rate Program, Mayes said.
The program, administered by the Federal Communications Commission, provides discounted telecommunications services to schools and libraries throughout the country. Mayes said that once the Bentonville School District’s bandwidth capabilities are expanded, the monthly cost is projected to rise to about $8,000, of which the E-Rate Program is expected to pay about half.
In terms of placing technology in classrooms, Mayes said, the district aims to create “21st Century classrooms,” with devices such as interactive white boards, computers, tablets and other technology to facilitate project-based or problem-based learning.
About 60 classrooms throughout the district have been outfitted with either laptop computers or, for grades kindergarten through second, iPad computer tablets.
“The benefit is to provide students with the technological tools to complement their studies in the classroom,” Mayes said. “With [kindergartners through second-graders], they’re digital natives. The world they’ve grown up in, that type of technology has always been there. They’re ducks in water.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 09/27/2013