Throughout this document we have alluded to the many ways in which networking can support teachers, students, and administrators. In this chapter we briefly illustrate some of the ways networks, and the Internet in particular, can contribute to the development of new curriculum and collaborative learning, the design and implementation of restructuring efforts, and the administration and organization of schools and districts.
Introduction
Imagine you are suddenly given a low-cost tool which enables you to rethink the way learning takes place in your classrooms by taking advantage of a vast array of new information resources and thought-provoking creative challenges. How would you begin to take advantage of this powerful tool?
Rather than being a far-fetched scenario, this is the exciting opportunity and the accompanying dilemma facing the thousands of educators who have recently been introduced to networking. After years and years of isolation, educators find themselves with instant access not just to a few pre-selected resources, but to an infinite number of individuals, organizations, conferences, and research institutions posting primary source information every minute of every day worldwide. Envisioning the possibilities such connectivity will provide administration, staff, and students is the vital first step in designing relationships with the network.
In this Guide it is recommended that a school or district create a network infrastructure that provides access to local resources and to the Internet, the most comprehensive "network of networks" in existence today. The Internet's primary purpose has been to facilitate and foster communication among researchers and higher education, to make possible long-distance collaboration, and to provide a vehicle through which images, text, and computer applications can be exchanged. Only recently has this network been recognized by the K-12 education community as a valuable tool and have local and state resources been allocated to support access to it.
As described throughout this document, the Internet provides a wide variety of capabilities beyond those available through local networks. As illustrated below these capabilities translate into an even greater number of educational opportunities when they are meaningfully woven throughout a well-designed networking strategy.
Focus on the Classroom
In general, local area networks provide classroom teachers several important services (e.g., the opportunity to exchange mail with local colleagues, to share printers, to use local file servers, etc.). Access to the Internet greatly expands the number of networking opportunities available to teachers and students. These opportunities fall into three basic categories: one-to-one communications (email), one-to-many/many-to-many communications (e.g., bulletin boards, listservs), and data exchange. The various tools and resources on the network facilitate use of the network in these various forms.
The first and most pervasive form of one-to-one communications on the Internet is electronic mail or email. Email provides users the opportunity to exchange personal communications, or "letters," with any of the five million Internet users, as well as with subscribers to commercial online services. In the classroom, email enables students and teachers to share information and ideas with other students and teachers worldwide, exchange information with working professionals, and receive individualized instruction from distant mentors.
"As students or educators engage in dialogue with other participants in an email network, they might work on joint projects, gathering data, exchanging ideas, and perhaps getting tips from online experts. The significance of a topic comes to life as real people respond with new views, questions, and comments. The seemingly abstract concept of communicating electronically likewise becomes concrete as students receive electronic feedback." [1]
The second mode, one-to-many/many-to-many communications, allows individuals or groups to place messages on an online bulletin board, where they can be read and commented on by a host of other users in the network. This kind of communications on the network is often accomplished through applications and services such as listservs and USENET News (see Part III, Chapter 7, Internet Services). Using listserv, for example, the users participate in worldwide discussions which are conducted using email. Once a user or group of users have subscribed to a listserv, he/they can read and respond to questions and issues generated by others who have also joined the group. Very similar in function is a service referred to as USENET News. Like listserv, USENET allows users to participate in online discussions with other users located anywhere on the network. Unlike listserv, however, the messages generated by the groups are not delivered via email but rather are accessed using a separate application.
An important distinguishing feature of Internet discussion groups is that participants are free to send and receive as many messages as they wish, and are not limited in their participation by incremental costs and/or the constraints of their subscription. For example, a user accessing a commercial on-line service will usually pay ordinary phone charges, a subscription fee, hourly use charges, and in some cases, per message charges for individual emails. By contrast, once access to the Internet is established for a user, incremental usage costs are not a concern.
The third mode of classroom use, data exchange, includes information retrieval and publication. Information retrieval can be achieved using a number of applications and services, such as Fetch, Telnet, Wide Area Information Services (WAIS), and Gopher (see Part III, Chapter 7, Internet Services). The value of each of these applications is that the user can retrieve information from computers and databases worldwide, often in a mater of seconds. Similarly, the Internet provides an extremely cost-effective vehicle for information dissemination. Individuals, classrooms, schools, county offices of education, state departments, and even national agencies use the Internet to send announcements, articles, inquiries, requests for proposals, research, and other information to targeted, or sometimes very large, audiences.
The Internet, Curriculum, and Project-based Learning
With these basic, and by no means exhaustive, modes of Internet use in mind, consider the following current examples of Internet usage by K-12 students and teachers in California:
- Students participating in Global Lab, an NSF-funded project, study local and global ecological change, using new instruments and sensors such as ozonometers, ion-selective probes, and field data loggers. When students in Boston and Moscow establish uniform guidelines to compare the environmental quality of their study sites, they learn both the rigors and excitement of research science.
- A 7th grade language arts teacher plans to use Kidsnet to find teachers and students in other parts of the world willing to exchange writing with her class. Together they will write iterative stories and edit each other's works;
- A 6th grade teacher is using NASA Spacelink and other telnet sites for cross-curricular projects integrating science, history, and social science;
- A special education teacher in a remote rural district sees the Internet as her best means for accessing information and, more importantly, communicating with others who are interested and involved in new movements and are trying new teaching methods.
- A 6th grade teacher plans to link her students to scientists worldwide in order to study topics such as: changes in forest composition over time, effects of oil spills, changes in kelp distribution over time, comparisons of urban/suburban/rural landscapes, and remote image processing and sensing.
- A high school physics teacher plans to enhance his physics curriculum by having his students compile an Internet portfolio containing text, computations, and graphics that together give a complete description of the forces acting on a flying boomerang and the effects of those forces. His research indicates that a large number of articles are already available through WAIS and by using the FETCH and VERONICA tools. His students will also receive information from NASA Ames that can be used to create images on the Silicon Graphics workstation at the school.
- A middle school visual arts teacher is subscribing to three conferences: ARTIST-L (a student art discussion), ASTUXCH-L (a student exchange in art, architecture and design), and GRAPHIX (a computer graphics referral). Using the Education Research Information Center (ERIC) she will have her students explore art archives, and in the future, she hopes to link her students by email with working artists.
- A high school teacher will teach literacy, using the Internet to facilitate online data searches.
- A teacher is attempting to create a Hypercard share Gopher service so that teachers and students can more easily locate Hypercard stacks created by others; he hopes to eventually convince the State Department of Education to act as home base for the stacks.
- A middle school teacher is working through CSIN ( a network of over 1,400 science teachers in California) to use Landsat-type imaging to design open-ended environmental research units.
- 4th grade students in one school are acting as "experts," using their own research and encyclopedias to answer email questions sent by 1st graders at another school;
- A 1st grade teacher is having her students send email to other students about who they are and what their families are like (communication of this sort is closely monitored by the teacher to ensure that no information is sent across the network which could compromise a family's safety or privacy);
- An elementary school Spanish teacher is having her students communicate with native Spanish-speaking children in other schools in order to improve their written communication and learn more about Spanish speaking nations.
In each of these examples, a teacher or group of teachers thought first of what they wanted to teach and then used the network as a tool for bringing a broader variety of information and human resources to their students. They correctly perceived that the network would enable them to overcome barriers of distance and time to connect their students with thousands of others worldwide.
Maximizing the Network's Potential
The Internet is the most powerful tool the information age has created for enhancing curriculum for students of all ages, but its use promises a certain amount of unpredictability. The vast number of possible contacts for students and teachers requires that educators using the Internet be prepared to learn along with their students, adapting their curricula in order to use each unexpected response as an educational opportunity. As pointed out by Eugene Nuccio, "the integration of computer hardware and software into classroom instruction is more dependent upon modification of instructional behavior than their level of sophistication with computer technology." [2] For example, imagine the following scenario:
Joseph, a fifth-grader is instructed by his teacher to log onto the network once a week and send email to a fellow student. Joseph does as he's told, enjoying the opportunity to use the computer and talk to a stranger about movies. While playing on the network during his lunch, he discovers that he can print book reviews that students at another school have written. When he tries incorporating one of these reviews into his own book report, his teacher tells him the reference is unacceptable because she did not list the source he used as one of the acceptable reference materials.
Imagine, in contrast, this example of Internet use in the classroom:
A group of students and teachers post the following message to FrEdMail (an educational network): "We are planning a school-wide observance of the coming together of Two Old Worlds in a World's Faire-1492. We are interested in your children's response to the question, 'Was Columbus a Hero?' We look forward to hearing from students from around the globe."
The following two responses were among the many they received:
"Columbus was a hero because he was brave to sail uncharted sea and was courageous to face the unknown. He opened up the new world for others to explore and Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. Columbus went where no other man had gone before and discovered new places. He helped to prove that the earth is round."
Armaruth M. de la Cruz, Armstrong High School, Starkville, Mississippi
" The first known European who 'discovered' America was Leiv Erikson from Iceland and Norway. If anyone should be called a hero it must be him!!! And to my knowledge he didn't kill any Indians. Columbus came there hundreds of years later and rediscovered the continent. And he thought that he came to India. He can perhaps be called a hero of second degree?"Jan Wibe, Trondheim, Norway
The receipt of the second response caused the teachers to rethink the curriculum, adding special emphasis to discussions on cultural perspectives and the biases in the teaching of history based upon national pride.
In the second example, the teachers leveraged the unpredictability of the Internet; in the first, the teacher tried to eliminate it. It is important to understand that the role of the teacher often becomes coach and facilitator, rather than "gatekeeper," when students embark upon their Internet navigation.
Educators are not alone in their quest to design exciting new opportunities for students which take advantage of the Internet's many capabilities. In fact, many universities and research organizations are looking for ways to connect their staff with students, particularly in the areas of math and science. For example, NASA is in the midst of a project to connect researchers in the Antarctic with K-12 classrooms nationwide. This project is called Live from...Other Worlds and features three live television broadcasts from Antarctica accompanied by on-line activities and teachers' guides (which are available via Gopher and File Transfer Protocol (FTP)). So that teachers can maximize the benefits their students receive from this series, the teachers' guides include topics such as:
- Mars Via Antarctica (Activities for grades 5 and up)
- Long-Distance Data Transmission (Activities for grades 5-10)
- Student Drivers...Robot Drivers (Activities for grades 5-10)
- Building a Robotic Arm (Activities for grades 5-10)
- Roving 'Round Mars:
- Creating/Exploring a Virtual Environment (Activities for grades 6 and up)
- Mapping
- Creating a Virtual Environment
- Searching for Life
- Suggested Further Reading and Audiovisual Resources
- Glossary and Key NASA Missions
The NASA series is one of many which are available at no charge to teachers; others, such as CNN News Guides, do have associated charges. If the current trend continues, the number of these resources will increase dramatically over the next five to ten years.
Collaboration: Overcoming Barriers of Time and Distance
Another primary benefit of connectivity to the Internet is that communication can occur at any hour of the day or night and, perhaps more importantly, can occur without individuals having to arrange to be absent from their workplaces and/or classrooms. This is of particular importance to rural school districts, which face substantial obstacles in overcoming their isolation. Without the traditional constraints of scheduling and the commute time required to visit the school, working professionals are able to contribute to classroom activity and curriculum development in a more iterative fashion.
Barry Kort, a visiting scientist at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., writes of his enlightening experience exchanging email with a 7-year-old-student:
While one might expect electronic mail to be used primarily by academics and professionals, this author, for over a year, exchanged email with a 7-year old boy in Atlanta. With an average of 2 letters per week, the transcripts of my correspondence with Abram now fill a 1-inch binder. The format of the exchange is Socratic Dialogue, with the intent of engaging Abram in exploration of scientific material. Abram's literacy and communication skills have improved dramatically while his scholarship, attitude toward school, and self confidence have progressed from problematic to exemplary. That computer networks can enable a professional scientist to reach into the home and the life of an American child is a testament to the largely untapped potential of network technology.
Another wonderful example of scientist/student collaboration can be seen in this excerpt from a series of email exchanges between Paul Smith, a physics doctoral student from Melbourne working at Casey Research Base in Antarctica, and sixth grade students in Lincoln, Nebraska:
Q: What is your job in Antarctica?
A: I am helping set up an instrument called an ionosonde that can be used to study the lower ionosphere (region from around 90km to 500km high.)
Q: What is your degree in?
A: I did a bachelor of science degree 4 years majoring in physics and computer science. Now I'm doing a PhD in electronic engineering and physics. I've done a bit less than a year of that so there will be another three years to go I expect.
Q: Do you have pets there?
A: Nobody is allowed to introduce foreign animals into Antarctica now, because of the damage they will probably cause. The huskies or sled dogs are being taken back to Australia...This is not a popular decision at some of the stations because they're really treated as pets there and are also seen as a part of the history of exploring Antarctica. However there is a new set of guidelines being introduced called the Madrid Protocol that requires all non-native animals to be taken away. Probably the best thing to do in the long run.
Q: Why did you want to work in Antarctica?
A: Opportunity of a lifetime!!! After all this is one place that is not easy to get to, and I love traveling and seeing new places. It's not like anything else I've done in my life, that's for sure.
This kind of exchange excites students to careers in ways that classroom instruction alone cannot provide. As a by-product of their exchanges with working professionals, students are inspired to acquire and evaluate additional information, interpret and pose hypotheses, and test their ideas using computers as a tool to facilitate their research.
Beyond this, students benefit from the introduction of the Internet into their classrooms by having the opportunity to learn one of the most important skills required by employers in the information age, the ability to work with "colleagues" from diverse backgrounds to solve problems. Students graduating from today's schools not only need a sense of what knowledge is and what the pursuit of knowledge means but also need to know how to communicate to others what they have learned and how to get access to what others are learning. This need was recently articulated by the Committee on Physical, Mathematical, and Engineering Sciences and the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology in a report on the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative. The report concludes:
In a growing number of science and technology fields, progress and productivity in modern research are increasingly dependent on the close interaction of people located in distant places, sharing and accessing computational resources across networks.
Reaching a similar conclusion, the United States Department of Labor June 1991 SCANS report: "What Work Requires of Schools - A SCANS Report for America 2000" states that among the skills and competencies necessary for students entering the workplace are the ability to:
- acquire and evaluate information;
- organize and maintain information;
- interpret and communicate information;
- use computers to process information;
- work well with men and women from diverse backgrounds; and
- work toward agreements involving exchange of resources, resolving divergent interests.
In a recent article, Beverly Hunter, [3] formerly a program director at the National Science Foundation, states:
Increasing numbers of educational improvement projects are designed with the assumption that learners and teachers should interact with geographically and institutionally distributed human and information resources. A further characteristic in many of these projects is that learners become contributors to the collaborative knowledge base of the learning community in addition to being users of other's data and expertise. Students and teachers become connected to the global community and the gap between the world of school and the world of work is narrowed. For example, in the popular Shadows project, children from around the world measure noontime shadows of a meter stick on their schoolyards. They then share their data with the other participants, and use the collective data to compute the earth's circumference.
Another example of the Internet as a collaborative vehicle is the "Learning Through Collaborative Visualization" project in which students and teachers in Boulder, Colorado, study atmospheric science with scientists at the University of Michigan, San Francisco's Exploratorium, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Champaign-Urbana, and TERC. Students access multiple representations of the same weather phenomena using National Weather Service data and satellite images. In addition, they are experimenting with two-way audio-video technology being developed by Bellcore and Ameritech.
In addition to providing an excellent vehicle for student collaboration, the Internet opens many doors for teachers, reminding them of the excitement and "sense of opportunity" they first felt when embarking on their careers. This excitement is conveyed in the following testimonials from teachers who have just completed their first year of Internet use:
I have been given the opportunity to utilize a computer,...email and information services in my daily lesson planning. It has altered the way I go about my job, and the way I perceive myself as a teacher such as no other thing thus far in my career... I have been led down a tunnel. At first the tunnel was new and scary...I began to realize there were all sorts of branches which I could follow. It has not occurred to me to turn back for I have learned too much, and I am having too much fun.
-Liz Matchett, Spanish teacher, grades 5-8
...The Internet is the catalyst for integrating technology within our curriculum, and injecting awareness into our lives and into the lives of our students.
-Theresa Baker, Teacher, Technology Coordinator
The Internet and Restructuring
In addition to enhancing curriculum, use of the Internet provides many opportunities which support the restructuring efforts upon which many schools have already embarked. For example, in Table 4-1, Beverly Hunter in her paper "Linking for Learning: Computer-and-Communications Network Support for Nationwide Innovation in Education" provides examples of ways in which the Internet could support aspects of school restructuring (some examples have been adapted slightly):
Table 4-1
| Educational Challenge/Trend | Implications for Internet Use |
|---|---|
| Reform instructional methods and curriculum in order to better meet the needs of diverse students and information age society. |
Internet provides access to: research on teaching and learning; alternative instructional materials; access to individuals worldwide. |
| Forge closer linkage among school, community, industry, and home; essential to restructuring contextualized learning. |
Build local network connections and organization to facilitate parent, business partnerships and linkages with organizations outside the school. |
| Collaborative learning is an increasingly desired goal and classroom method. Shift from competitive or individual to collaborative modes of learning presents major challenges. |
The Internet supports collaborative investigation and research among individuals of all ages and nationalities modeling for students the new mode of work and study in the information age. |
| Curricula and teacher knowledge and continual updating. Action research by teachers is becoming more valued as teachers take innovator roles |
The Internet provides up-to-the-minute information in all areas of study and forums for teachers to share latest findings, curriculum, and assessment tools. |
Of primary importance to teachers engaged in restructuring efforts is the need to communicate with others regarding curriculum, assessment, governance, scheduling, and other school and classroom issues. The Internet is effectively facilitating a number of small and large forums to support these dialogues.
For example, the Geometry Forum, organized by Eugene Klotz at Swarthmore College, "is attempting to build a virtual community of research geometers, high school and college students and teachers, developers of instructional materials and researchers in geometry education. They are developing software for accessing the Forum that will support symbols, diagrams, and some hypertext features with a simple and convenient user interface. The conjecture being tested is that closer working relationships among researchers, teachers, and instructional developers will enable more rapid transformations of school mathematics curriculum content and teaching methods along the lines called for by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics." [4]
Jim Levin and his colleagues at the University of Illinois have developed a model called "Teaching Teleapprenticeships," in which teacher-education students and practicing teachers participate in network-based activities with K-12 students and teacher educators. They are testing the notion that undergraduates learn more productively if they work directly with professional teachers and children throughout their undergraduate years.
In Mendocino, California, Cory Wisna, a middle school science teacher, is spearheading a grass-roots effort to create a conference specifically for math and science teachers in California. Using existing networks such as the California Science Implementation Network (CSIN) and the Math Renaissance Project, and with assistance from NASA, the Autodesk Foundation and the Telemation Project, Cory is designing his project to provide a curriculum sharing project for math and science mentors and staff developers. In addition to establishing the conference, Cory is also advocating for a training component to the conference so that eager participants without prior Internet experience can be brought into the dialogue.
School Administration and Governance
Networks and the Internet in particular support school administration and governance in many ways, including, but not limited to, those listed below:
Schools currently must wait an average of 24 days (and up to two months) for receipt of student information from centralized information centers. More than one million student records are shared each year between K-12 schools and institutions of higher education with the cost of sending and receiving these records exceeding $21 million. The cost to schools of reporting student information to the State of California exceeds $35 million. Local and state cost savings as a result of transmitting appropriate school records via the network are expected to exceed $15 million per year.
Specifically, the California Department of Education is developing a statewide electronic California Student Information System (CSIS) which will transfer student and school data quickly and reliably between schools, districts, county offices, the California Department of Education, postsecondary institutions, and other appropriate state and social service agencies in California. Transmitted information will include demographics, academic histories, special programs, standardized test scores, and other information as deemed appropriate.
Directives from state, county and district offices can be transmitted electronically at less expense and with greater speed using electronic bulletin boards, conferences, and other email groups. Similarly, central ordering (with timely updating) of cafeteria, janitorial, and other supplies as well as local ordering of supplies stored in central warehouses can be done by email, reducing time-consuming requisition processes and streamlining inventory databases.
Internetworking can bring back to life outdated and even obsolete equipment. Almost all computers currently found in K-12 schools can be networked as described in the Guide. This means that even older machines can be brought into effective service using inexpensive software which enables them to emulate terminals. These computers, many of which are now sitting idle, can be employed to transfer binary files, send and receive email, login to remote machines, and transfer files across the nets.
Grant announcements and guidelines can be rapidly disseminated throughout the system; applications can be prepared and reviewed using both conferencing and email. A central archive of successful grant applications, district/county grant-related regulations, and other grant-related data can be maintained for instant access by school personnel.
Many face-to-face administrative meetings can be eliminated by use of online conferencing. Local news groups and mail lists allow people at remote sites to contribute to planning, conflict resolution, and other forms of decision making without the time and expense of arranging after-school and evening meetings.
Networking is a first small step toward the paperless office. Initially schools with few computers may see an increase in paper use as the flood of new information must be printed to distribute to those who have limited network access. As computers increase in number the school may expect to reduce, though not eliminate, its consumption of paper.
School Site Councils and other school reform and governance bodies have free access to the vast Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database, which catalogues education-related books, periodicals, organizations, and other resources. One service, ASK-ERIC, does all the research on an emailed query and returns an annotated bibliography of sources and full text of appropriate studies completed by ERIC staff. Archives of school and district planning documents are being developed, and news-groups and conferences are continually being created to facilitate communication between and among educators with similar interests and needs.
Conclusions
Just as the largest economic and social challenges of our nation require new collaboration among geographically distant individuals, organizations, and governments, so the greatest challenges in school and curriculum reform require communication that has heretofore been minimal or nonexistent. Although there is no formula for how to integrate the Internet into all school activities, hundreds of examples of creative use exist. The quickest and most effective way to learn more about this is to join a conference, news group, bulletin board, or forum. Through these vehicles, people pose their own ideas for others to respond to, read about where others' work has led them, and work collaboratively with their students and peers to explore new possibilities one small step at a time.
[1] Peter Grunwald, "Telecommunications
in the Classroom," The Electronic School, October
1991,
A4-6.
[2] Eugene Nuccio, PhD, "The Next Generation of Teachers: Past Skills, Future Models," Journal of Educational Technology Systems, Volume 18, Number 4 (1990), 279.
[3] Beverly Hunter, "Coordinating Technology for Systemic Reform," Communications of the ACM, May 1993, Vol. 36, No.5.
