Submitted by:
Ken Klingenstein
Director
Computing and Network Services
University of Colorado at Boulder
3645 Marine Street
Boulder, CO 80302 USA
v: (303) 492-8176
f: (303) 492-4198
e: kjk@spot.colorado.edu
Categories:
Education, K12
Keywords:
Innovative and improved way of doing things
The Story:
The Boulder Valley Project is a comprehensive effort by the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) and the University of Colorado in Boulder to deploy Internet connectivity, develop curriculum, and assess network impact on the education programs and operations of an entire school district. The goals of the project involve integrating networking into all aspects of the K-12 process and, to a significant degree, the surrounding community. Critical support is being provided by NSF, Colorado Supernet (the state Interne provider), and Westnet (a multi- state regional network).
The Boulder Valley Project is a comprehensive effort by the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) and the University of Colorado at Boulder to deploy Internet connectivity, develop curriculum, and assess network impact on the education programs and operations of an entire school district. The goals of the project involve integrating networking into all aspects of the K-12 process and, to a significant degree, the surrounding community. Critical support is being provided by NSF, Colorado Supernet (the state Internet provider), and Westnet (a multi- state regional network).
It is still very early in the Boulder project, but a number of aspects are apparent. The costs are significant but are more related to upgrading the school computing environment than network access per se. Teachers do need training and in service opportunities, but are quite interested and find the network compelling for both professional development and curriculum. The issues of managing individual student accounts are thorny, but students can provide considerable assistance and welcome the responsibility and privacy of individual accounts.
But beyond the costs, training, and management lies the impact. It is clear, several months into a multi-year project, that the impact will be greater than we perceived. Access to information and communication through networks will obviously be profoundly important to K12.
There is the immediate value that simple network connectivity provides. Librarians find resources beyond their modest walls; for a BVSD language teacher, “I no longer say `if you ever visit Spain…’. Now I say `when you log on this afternoon, notice how the Spanish kids in your chat-session use…” Writing teachers notice the results in the motivation of their student authors, who write more carefully when the audience is a mass of peers around the world. For a local first- grader with a prosthetic arm, a special-ed teacher finds a distant keypal with a similar disability. Science teachers use real time data as the grist for their teaching. The network has made effective the mentoring of elementary students by middle schoolers, the mentoring of high-school kids by college students and local industry.
Secondly, there is the new curriculum. This consists of teaching the old skills in new ways. Geogame links thirty schools around the world and engages students in otherwise dry areas. Skymath uses weather and astral phenomena as a platform for trig, algebra, and basic calculus. Civics uses the network for up-to date information. The debate team develops its positions using the national dialogue of netnews.
There is also the opportunity to teach analysis and synthesis. This spring, middle schools in Boulder and five locations around the world spent three weeks gathering data on local weather conditions. Then, across the network, the students exchanged information, with the intent of building an expert in each class with a global understanding of a particular weather parameter. The seventh grade class experts developed modules to teach third graders about weather. Students went beyond passive receiving to become kid-level experts for their own networked community.
And lastly, there is a growing awareness of the skills that the kids in grade school today will need as information workers in the twenty-first century. They will need to develop electronic skimming techniques and the ability to evolve a cogent and linear meaning from the “factoids” that are accessed through networked keyword searches. They will need capacities to infer the validity and value of diverse information repositories. In the course of BVSD we are uncovering some of what will be needed by both the workers and citizens of the next decades. The challenge is to create curriculum to nurture such skills.
The network will, in its depth and scope, transform K-12 education.
For additional information contact:
Libby Black, Project Director
Boulder Valley Internet Project
University of Colorado at Boulder
3645 Marine Street
Boulder, Colorado, 80302
v: (303) 447-5090
f: (303) 492-4198
e: blackl@bvsd.co.edu