Laptop Initiative in Daviess County
Public Schools
By
Cheryl Purdy
CIS 634 Management of Telecommunications
Laptop Initiative in Daviess County
Public Schools
eSchool News’, 2001, "Tech Savvy Superintendents of the Year", had a vision. Stu Silberman’s vision was that every high school student in Daviess County Public Schools be provided with a laptop computer to use both at school and at home.
Today’s generation of students, the “Millennials,” are experts at multitasking and quite adept at using technology. (Olsen, 2005) They text message each other from their cell phones; they IM each other; they study while watching TV or listening to music; they use the web for research projects, they have blogs; they use Skype; they play many, many games online; the list is almost endless. Students today have grown up in a technologically stimulating world. They are so tied to technology that it’s almost an “extension of their central nervous system.” (Schwartz, 2005) Yet, traditional methods are still attempted to educate these young people. In an interview with the editor of eSchool news, Susan Patrick, director of educational technology for the United States Department of Education states, “The paper-based system does not make any sense to kids who are coming up in school. Is our educational system geared toward innovation? Do we want an 18th century model for our schools or a 21st century model for our schools?” (Brumfield, 2005) Silberman’s vision was for teachers to integrate technology into the everyday classroom curriculum bringing our schools into the unlimited resources of the 21st century. Thus, began the “Daviess County Public Schools Laptop Initiative.”
The Pilot Project
The
planning team for the
The DCPS project team make-up included several committees and a variety of representatives served on each committee. The planning team was subdivided into the following research groups:
· Leadership/School Vision
· Public Relations
· Purchasing/Funding
· Hardware/Network/Security
· Software/Training
· Implementation
· Evaluation
· Curriculum
· Discipline Policies
· Multimedia Policies (Project Team)
After a great deal of researching, analysis, and planning, the district made a commitment to the pilot project. Once the hardware and software criteria were established, the RFPs were distributed to potential vendors in June of 2003. In addition to state-of-the-art processor and RAM requirements, other common hardware requirements included; DVD/CD-RW; SVideo; IEEE 1394 (Firewire); 2 USB ports; microphone; speakers; modems; 10/100 Ethernet ports and 801.11b wireless capabilities. (Notebook Hardware Specs) The RFP not only included the above mentioned hardware requirements, but also included a vendor training requirement for both students and faculty.
The
pilot project was implemented during the 2003-2004 school year. During the pilot, a select group of freshmen students
from each of the three high schools,
Additionally,
selected teachers, in core content areas, were also provided with laptops and
projectors. The summer of 2003 was
filled with a rigorous professional development program for these faculty
members. It would be remiss in enabling
students’ access to this powerful technology without fully training faculty in
technology integration. Studies have
shown that it may take up to 50 hours of training, practice, and modeling
before faculty would feel comfortable with classroom application.
(Teclehaimanot & Lamb, 2005) Other
research, from a
In addition to hardware training, pilot teachers were trained on the use of the installed software and the various web services to which the district subscribes. The laptop image included the installation of Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, Flash, Windows Media Player, Windows Movie Maker; TI Graphing Calculator and various other software. Some of the online subscription services included NetTrecker, Curriculum Pathways, Geometer’s Sketchpad, Atomic Learning, United Streaming, and again, many others. (Laptop Software List) It was a busy summer for the teachers involved in the pilot project!
Instructional Implementation
At
the conclusion of the pilot project, after the evaluation of instructional
advantages, technical support, cost, battery life, durability of the machines, wireless
connectivity issues and other factors, the decision was made to move forward
with the project. Additionally, IBM was selected
as the vendor. Before providing all 9th
grade students with laptops, the decision was made to first, provide all secondary teachers with laptops. In May of 2004, all high school faculty
members were provided with IBM ThinkPad R50s and projectors. There were two intensive training sessions
prior to dismissal of school for the summer.
Additionally, rigorous professional development sessions for that summer
were mandated for all secondary faculty.
Through DITA,
At last, in August of 2005, the rollout day arrived -- Daviess County Public Schools distributed 900 laptops to all high school freshmen. Since then, all core content text books have been downloaded to student laptops. Students can now access their texts freely and easily without having to carry around 40 pound backpacks. Students have been supplied with web outlook in order to email assignments to teachers. And, of course, all of the software and the wide range of web subscription service that were available during the pilot are still being used with the entire freshman class.
The
district has recently installed a Moodle server. Moodle,
Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, is an open source
eLearning platform that assists educators in the creation of online courses or
in adjunct to in-person courses. (Wikipedia) Moodle is similar to “Blackboard” used by
many colleges and universities. Instructors
begin by creating a course and adding participants to the course. The participants/students may then have
access to a variety of activities such as, assignments, chats, forums, quizzes,
resources, surveys and more. (Moodle Features Demo) Several teachers are currently using Moodle
for quizzes and assignment and the students absolutely love it!
With
the advent of the laptop initiative, instruction has taken on a whole new
perspective. Fine Arts teachers are now
able to project classic art large enough for the students to actually pick out
the textures and other aspects, as well as view these items on their own
screens. Math teachers are using United
Streaming videos to reemphasize the topics being taught. They are also having students to view actual
translations of graphs via a website that provides this function. English portfolio assignments are being
done on the students’ laptops and saved to their personal server space. Research is taking place via the web. Even technology courses, such as,
programming, computer applications, principals of computer technology and
graphic arts are taking advantage of the use of projectors and student
laptops. The laptop initiative in
Daviess County Public Schools is now in full swing!
Technical Implementation
The
district network infrastructure was already in place, prior to the laptop
initiative. As early as May of 1999, all
20 schools in the district were connected to the WAN, encompassing 4,930
networked nodes. All but two of these
schools were connected via Adelphia’s fiber.
At this time, the other two schools had dial-up access. This has since changed, as the district has
run fiber to the two outlying elementary schools. Even at that time, there were 3-T1 lines
running from a central point in the district to
The
primary infrastructure is the same as it was before the laptop initiative. All three high schools have multiple wiring
closet housing cabling, patch panels, hubs, switches and uninterruptible power
supplies. Each of the schools use
Ethernet technology in the LAN. Most of
the labs are patched into 10 Mbps hubs, while teacher stations are patched into
10/100 Mbps switches. The 10 Mbps hubs
are in the process of being phased out.
Non-lab classrooms each have six network drops primarily patched into
the 10/100 Mbps switches. Each school
has a main distribution facility where the instructional server, web server and
administration servers housed. Each MDF
has multiple UPSs. The network uses
multimode fiber backbones within the buildings that run from a switch in the
outlying wiring closets to the MDF in each building. Then the switch is connected to an SSR (router)
for packets to exit the building. The
packets then travel, via Adelphia’s single mode fiber through the gateway,
located at
In
preparation for the laptop initiative, RoamAbout R2 Enterasys wireless access
points were installed in each building. According
to a Market Data Retrieval survey, 45% of today’s schools are using wireless
networks. (Wireless on the Rise) The Enterasys
WAPs are capable of 802.11a/b/g communication.
Currently there are 30 WAPs at Apollo, 43 at
Beacon Central (DavEdNet, BCS, BCS Wireless, WhatsUp Professional 2005)
In addition to the wireless access points, other significant changes were made in preparation for the laptop rollout. A new proxy server was installed to handle the additional load created by 900 new users. Computer operations created an additional website for the purpose of network monitoring. As one would expect, the network load has shown a significant increase over this time a year ago. A video server was installed to store United Streaming videos. Teachers attempting to download these videos during the school day, puts a severe strain on the network. Instead, the video server will store these for local use. Network folders created for each teacher and student. Novell iPrint client was installed to allow printing to any available printer in the school(s). With students traveling from classroom to classroom, they need the ability to print in a variety of places. The server software was upgraded from Novell version 5 to version 6.5 and Novell client was upgraded to version 4.91. The newer client has more advanced features and fewer bugs. (J. Crady, School Technology Coordinator, personal interview, October 24, 2005) Although, other minor changes have been made to accommodate more users, these are the most significant.
Where do we go from here?
The ultimate goal is to provide laptop computers to all high school students. In order to achieve this ultimate goal, there are several issues that remain to be resolved. Obviously, bandwidth is a problem. Can the project go forward if the district does not acquire additional bandwidth from the state? The additional bandwidth has already been requested.
How will additional staff be provided to support this project? What will be the process for the work flow of technical support? How will after hours support be provided? Again, these issues are being addressed. Currently each school has one technician and a student help desk. The help desk is run from an IT classroom with many interruptions to the class being taught, as students walk in, or teachers call with laptop problems. To resolve this situation in the future, there has been a great deal of discussion regarding an additional technician for each school, as well as a technology resource teacher based at each school. The issue of after hours support has already been addressed. One of the district technicians has been provided will a cellular phone to take evening calls from students and parents.
Will
the district need to invoke a “fee for service” for repairs of certain
natures? Currently technicians are
seeing a lot of damage to student computers.
Much of this damage is due to negligence on the part of the student. As of October 6th, 2005,
What
company will step up and provide high-speed Internet Access for the WHOLE
county? Approximately 25% of our county
does not have access to high-speed service.
Nebraska representative Lee Terry and Virginia representative Rick
Boucher, recently released a draft of the “Universal Service Reform Act of 2005”,
which, in addition to taxing VoIP and broadband services, also proposes that
the universal service fund be used to subsidize broadband in rural areas.
(Reardon, 2005) As a result of this act,
the outlying 25% of
These and many other questions remain to be answered for the success of the future of the project.
Conclusion
Although
Since the pilot project, Stu Silberman has taken the position of superintendent of Fayette County Public Schools. Tom Shelton, current superintendent of Daviess County Public Schools (former assistant superintendent) had the same vision and has carried the project through to its current status.
Appendix A
Below are photos taken of the MDF, Main
Distribution Facility, at
Appendix B
Power Injector for Enterasys RoamAbout R2 Wireless Access Platform:
Photos taken by Author
References
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