NSF QUARTERLY REPORT

June 21, 1996

This quarterly report details CK:P's process in the institutionalization of educational uses of WAN technologies, in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. As in previous reports we will give information on the process as it applies to educational and technical support.

Educational Issues

USER Population

As of June 19, 1996 CK:P has 3,852 users on its system. Of these 1,114 are students at CK:P sites. Presently, there are 14 CK:P sites (7 Elementary Schools, 4 Middle Schools and 3 High Schools). CK:P continues to provide support for its user population via phone (622-5930), fax (622-5935) and email (trouble@pps.pgh.pa.us). Online support is most often used. An archive of trouble messages is kept at the following URL (local): news:ckp.trouble

RFP for Year 4

As mentioned in the previous quarterly report, CK:P used an RFP to choose its year 4 sites. A review panel made up of teachers, administrators, parents and school board members selected 6 new sites - high schools. These are: Taylor Allderdice High School, Langley High School, Letsche Alternative High School, Perry Traditional Academy, Peabody High School and the Pittsburgh School for the Creative and Performing Arts. The winning proposals can be found at the following URL: /projects/ckp/curriculum/curriculum.html#action

Educational Advisory Committee

The PPS Educational Advisory Committee met on May 23, 1996 to discuss project process and direction. The minutes of the meeting can be found at the following URL: /projects/ckp/publications/committees/ed/edmin52396.html

CK:P Education Office Moves

Due to PPS redistricting, CK:P will move its education offices (and beta site) to Peabody High School (a year 4 site). The move will be completed by September 1, 1996. New addresses and phone numbers will be announced via the WWW, email, and snail mail.

New Address:

Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh

515 North Highland Avenue

Pittsburgh, PA 15206

Exemplary Resources Created by Teachers and Students of the PPS

There are many examples of how PPS students and teachers have used the resources provided by CK:P. The following are a small list of exemplary practices. This list, with links to the actual projects, can be found at the following URL: /projects/ckp/curriculum/curriculum.html#example

Increment Credit Course on Using the Internet for Research

Many PPS teachers expressed interest in learning more about using the Internet for research purposes. Two librarians, Linda Savido and Kathy Olesak taught an 18 hour course on "Research on the Internet" for PPS teachers. The course outline and teacher projects are online.

The HTML Language and Creation of Home Pages

Oscar Huber and Regine Fougeres, teachers in the PPS, led the way in using HTML and the WWW in their classes. These two teachers taught an 18 hour increment credit course for PPS teachers. The course and the homepages created during the course are online.

Regine Fougere's Lesson Plans | Roxanne Gaal's Lesson Plans

Curriculum development takes on a new meaning when educators feel empowered to use the Internet in their classrooms. Regine Fougeres, a German teacher at Schenley H.S. is now using the World Wide Web to develop lessons for her German classes. Roxanne Gaal at Carrick HighSchool is using the WWW to take her classes to exhibits on French Impressionism. The book is not necessary when a teacher chooses to use primary sources available on the Internet.

Linda Savido and Kathy Olesak's Virtual Library

The Pittsburgh Public School Library Home Page is the result of a professional collaboration between Kathy Olesak at Schenley H.S. and Linda Savido at Westinghouse H.S. Through use of the Internet, these two educators in remote locations have collaborated and developed products that are useful for the school district and the Internet community.

The Inventors of SlipLube

Two students - John Fail and Brian Miles, at Brashear H.S., developed a package that provides SLIP software and configuration for the PC. This independent project (part of their gifted IEP) provided John and Brian with the opportunity to go far beyond typical classroom activities and develop a user-friendly product for school district users.

Deanna Harris and the SAM Project

The Westinghouse Science and Mathematics Program (SAM) gives students the opportunity to conduct scientific research. SAM students use the Internet to post research questions to newsgroups, to collaborate with online mentors via email, and to publish their final reports on the WWW. Use of the Internet has forced the SAM program to restructure how classes are scheduled and how students work together. This restructuring has students beginning their introduction to the Internet in the 10th grade problem solving courses. This continues in the 11th grade where students collaborate with 12th graders to conduct their research.

The 3Rivers Poetry Forum

3Rivers is an online poetry forum. It includes a number of Western Pennsylvania writing groups - elementary schools, high schools, and local writing workshops. Each group publishes and maintains a presence on the Net through the forum. This is an example of providing a place where multi-age groups can publish their work and receive feedback.

Student Links at CAPA

Dennis Childers is a photographer, artist and musician. He is also a teacher of video at CAPA High School. Dennis is working with his students on putting the PPS Friends of Art collection on the WWW. This entails taking photographs of donated art in Pittsburgh schools, scanning the photographs, and uploading them to an online collection. In addition, he has put a virtual photography exhibit on his homepage. He uses this as a model for student work at CAPA.

Peace Day at Colfax Elementary School

On World Peace Day November 17, 1995 two PPS schools celebrated by having a poster contest. The schools were Greenfield and Colfax elementaries. The schools' Developmental Advisor, Cheryl McLaughlin made it her job to teach her students about peace. What made the project unique was the communication with people on the Internet who were coordinating the activity. These are pictures of the students and their posters.

Scoring Rubrics for Student Generated Homepages

A common problem for educators is how to assess student learning, especially that which takes place on the Internet. At Westinghouse H.S., 4 teachers - Ed Henke, Linda Savido, Joanne Valco and Tom Valco - have created a scoring rubric that can be used to evaluate the quality of students' homepages.

Liberty E.S. Newsgroup (only accessible within PPS)

Students and teachers at Liberty Elementary School use a local newsgroup - pps.school.liberty - to conduct a variety of school business. Homework assignments, problems of the week, the school newspaper, announcements of meetings, etc. are posted on their newsgroup for all to see.

Stokan's Studio

Stokan's Studio is a second grade class with a language arts emphasis on art history. We have studied art from Medieval Times and are approaching art in the present day. One of the artists we've studied recently is Van Gogh. The children wrote their impressions of one of his paintings.

ONLINE - A PPS Internet Event

On Friday May 17, Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh took a snapshot of Internet activity in the classrooms and homes of PPS teachers and students. We were interested in finding out exactly what Internet activities occur during the time period from midnight to midnight on May 17. We asked teachers and students to send: that relate to curriculum, professional development and learning. During the day this homepage was expanded to include all contributions. The homepage was completed by midnight on the 17th.

Woolslair Computer Bytes

One of the interest classes offered during 2nd semester in the afternoon at Woolslair Gifted Center was "Computer Bytes". The teacher was Mrs. Ochs. The students in this class went on the Internet using Netscape, a Webcrawler, and Pine, an e-mail program. They got their own accounts and were able to write to other students from grades 2 to 6 (at least) in different states and countries such as Canada and Finland. The students wrote reviews after exploring the web. They rated the sites as "Bytes". 1 byte = poor, 2 = a little better, 3 = fair, 4 = pretty good, and 5 = great. Some children really liked the sites, but some found sites that they rated either 3, 2, or 1 bytes. That means they weren't satisfied. The children helped to design the Woolslair Computer Bytes Homepage. They have done a lot of work and have come up with good ideas. They all seem to have had a great time as they explored the 'Net, wrote reviews, and designed pages.

Technical Issues

The technical migration from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) to the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) is continuing in a positive manner. PPS has installed two new servers (cats1 and cats2) in the administration building. These servers will replace the PSC servers (titania and oberon, respectively). The PPS servers are now up and running on the internet. PSC and PPS are having weekly working meetings to begin the port of software from the existing PSC servers to the PPS servers. The most significant problem with this effort has been a hardware problem with cats1. DEC hardware support recently replaced the mother-board.

PPS is establishing a modem pool. This will enable PPS to support all dial-up access. Currently we are providing dial-up access via modem pools at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. The PPS modem pool is running in a beta mode with a total of ten modems. All modem pool access is scheduled to come through PPS during the fall of 1996.

PPS has also begun establishing ISDN connectivity via a Cisco router at the admin building. All ISDN service that is currently being routed via PSC will transfer to the PPS router. We are experiencing a hardware incompatibility between the site deployed ascend routers and the PPS cisco router. The solution has yet to be determined.

PPS has decided to deploy the BSDi operating system on the distributed school servers. BSDi is very similar to the existing Netbsd operating system, with the added benefit of providing phone support. PPS has negotiated a site licensing agreement with BSDi. All of the new site servers for the year four sites will be deployed with BSDi. An attempt to retrofit the existing school servers to BSDi will be undergone this summer. It is not clear if the existing hardware will support the new BSDi operating system.

Assessment Issues

During the second quarter of 1996 the Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh assessment staff has been continuing its work in four areas: tracking migration of the project from CK:P to PPS.; studying the issues that arise in implementing WAN at the classroom level; assessing the educational effects of WAN; and disseminating findings.

During this quarter, our tracking of migration issues has been from two sources. The first is our continued involvement with a committee which has developed a new technology plan for the school district which has allowed us to closely study the issues involved with developing such a plan for the district. The second is the observation of meetings and the tracking of e-mail exchanges between CK:P and PPS personnel in which migration was discussed. Upcoming summer interviews with a variety of PPS administrators and School Board members will build on this work and will focus heavily on issues of the migration of the CK:P project to the PPS.

We have also continued to collect data regarding the issues arising during the implementation of WAN in the schools and the educational effects of WAN use in the K-12 environment. Specifically, We have continued our classroom observations in several "case study" sites and we have attended meetings of the teams of teachers at these sites as they plan Internet use and discuss issues of implementation and curriculum development. During this quarter we interviewed approximately forty teachers and forty students, conducted surveys in two classrooms, and developed an on-line survey for all CK:P account holders. Although data analysis has been an ongoing activity, we have begun to focus more of our efforts on planning the analysis of the vast amounts of data we have gathered over the past three and one half years.

Our efforts in disseminating our findings during this quarter have been focused on writing two papers that have been submitted to the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. If these papers are accepted, they will be presented at the conference in January 1997 and published in the conference proceedings. We also presented a paper regarding the issues of collaboration between educational and technical professionals at the meetings of the American Educational Research Association in New York City in April.

Migration Issues

The sheer number of CK:P sites and users are having an impact on district technology activity. For the first time a number of PPS schools (non-CK:P) are spending school budgets on providing WAN resources for their students and teachers. This is significant. However, this creates a demand for educational, technical and policy support.

Migration of Educational Support

Educational support for WAN activities is provided by CK:P staff. Without the technology plan, CK:P has found little interest in the migration of these support mechanisms to district support staff. However, the CK:P model attempts to build this support locally within the school. We are aware that many of our schools are assigning duty periods to CK:P teachers specifically to support the projects at their schools.

Migration of Technical Support

Migration of technical support and infrastructure is moving along swiftly. A timeline and responsibility chart for this process can be found at the following URL: /projects/ckp/process/mschedule.html

PPS Tech Plan

In preparing for a district technology plan, PPS administration has agreed to place the unit that will implement instructional technology under Dr. Bernie Manning, PI on the CK:P grant. The next step is the full adoption of the Tech Plan. That step will allow for a more formal movement on the institutionalization of the lessons learned in CK:P.

Final Notes

Expenditure of Funds

The expenditure of hardware, connectivity and supply funds is on schedule. Personnel expenditures are falling behind for the following reasons:

PPS - Difficulty in hiring technical staff for system administration. We have posted the positions in the newspapers, on USENET, on local bulletin boards at CMU and Pitt. We are now working with PPS Computer Services to locate someone for this position.

PSC - Here again there has been some difficulty replacing technical staff that is no longer with the project.

PITT - The assessment group is consciously holding off spending money in order to keep money in reserve for the analysis of the data. They would like to continue to collect data for as long as possible.

For these reasons we will contact NSF during the third quarter with information as to the amount of this years budget we would like to carry over into 1997.