US/ND-1: Re: Educational Value
Re: Educational Value
Tom Hibbs (thibbs@k12.colostate.edu)
Fri, 30 Aug 1996 20:20:54 -0600 (MDT)
At 12:45 PM 8/29/96 -0700, Currie Morrison wrote:
>On Thu, 29 Aug 1996, Mario Zinga wrote:
>My feelilng is that Mario has made a siginificant contribution in getting
>this discussion moving forward.
>
>My feeling is that standards have been and are being set from a purely
>technological and hardware standpoint already. For that area we should
>push for lowcost devices and access that schools can afford.
When schools pay through taxes, they are using money collected from all the
public to obtain services to educate our children, and as mentioned several
times, and our adult population. I don't mind a monoply being obliged to
provide special services for specific segments of their customers, but
Internet service is not covered by monoply legislation (like phone service).
I think schools need to pay the cost. That way the cost is spread out to
all the people in the district, not to the customers of the service company.
>
>However, much more important is how we want to use the access to enhance
>our children's education and how we are going to train the milions of
>present day teachers to not use this access but to use this access in an
>enthusiastic way.
>
>Waiting for the next generatin of college trained teachers is too long to
>wait.
Please don't wait on the regular college trained teachers. I agree that the
money from this legislation needs to be manipulated, but I would favor that
we use it to connect schools and libraries for a "trial period" so they can
learn to use the technology during the beginning periods when it is not a
"reasonable cost" based on educational benefit. This would be like funding
original research. Once we get to the stage that a district has had
connectivity for a period of time, they are not likely to drop out. They
are likely to closely monitor their source and look for the best price.
We have had a four year experience as the only school in a 70-mile circle
that has had a 56K connection. The grant paid the going public price for
the services in our area. The initial years of a grant covering the
connection and training were essential in exploring our needs. This year we
were required to pay for our own connection. The board didn't even question
the expense. The training part was and is essential! It is still funded by
the grant.
For reference, we are one of the nation's and Colorado's very small schools
with only 250 students K-12. That qualifies us as rural. We teach
Internet, have a WWW site, teach programming, and have our own server
because of an "initial connection and continuing training" grant. Other
school districts participating in the grant are about 1500 to many thousands
of students in Denver. The impact in a rural area is more dramatic, but
even for the larger districts, the impact of the "initial connection and
continuing training" grant is very important.
>
This legislation needs to manipultated and a way that a significant
>sum of money be spent on Training and acceptable uses of this technology.
>THIS IS AN AREA WHERE BUSINESS SEEMS TO DO A MUCH BETTER JOB THAN
>SCHOOL DISTRICTS. Why????
>
>Cheers!
>
>Currie
>
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> || Currie Morrison * currie@hale.ssd.k12.wa.us ||
> || Nathan Hale High School * Technology Coordinator ||
> || HTTP://hale.ssd.k12.wa.us * Seattle Public Schools ||
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