Info Highway: a Long and Winding Road
Schools pressed by need for technology, better training, and revamped curriculum
JOHN NOMES and three other classmates at the Peabody School in Cambridge, Mass., cluster around a computer in the back of Jackie Crowe's seventh-grade science class.Skip to next paragraph
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They are studying planetary construction. Their assignment: to download earthquake statistics from the National Earthquake Information Center on the Internet and plot the data on a world map. The results will show that earthquakes have occurred along plate boundaries, explaining how the continents were formed.
In past classes, Mrs. Crowe says, it's been a tough sell to get students to look up often-outdated material in books. Now, she practically has to pull her students away from their work.
''I never had to fight to get them to go to lunch before,'' she says, trying to usher several students out the door.
What's going on in this classroom is what President Clinton hopes will soon be standard everywhere. His goal: to have every classroom and library in the country - public and private - connected to the Internet by 2000. Forty-four states are already moving forward with education-technology plans under grants from the federal Goals 2000 program.
But wiring schools to the information superhighway is only a start. A big component will be training teachers, integrating computers into the curriculum, and even reevaluating the way students are taught. This doesn't mean nixing the basics, experts say, but rather teaching them in the context of modern technology.
''The schools are way out of date in terms of being able to provide a learning environment that is comparable to the way we want people to perform on the job,'' says Dave Moursand, executive director of the International Society for Technology in Education in Eugene, Ore.
While some educators question whether every classroom will actually be surfing the Internet in 4-1/2 years, few dispute the need for computers to be integrated into the curriculum. Students with access to computers will excel in tomorrow's work force; those without ''will graduate with skills that prepare them for yesterday, not tomorrow,'' says Cheryl Lempke of the Illinois State Board of Education. The president's proposal, she and others hope, may help level the playing field.
In comparison with other countries, the United States leads in using technology innovatively in the classroom. Even so, the number of successful programs in schools remains limited.
A decade ago, 75 students typically shared access to one computer. Currently there is about one computer for every 10 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. This is an average, meaning that while some schools may be very well equipped, others have virtually no computer technology.
But while the number of computers is growing in most schools, Internet access is often very limited. In Crowe's class, for example, more than 20 students share one computer with Internet access. Only 35 percent of all schools are connected, and a tiny fraction of classrooms in those schools are hooked up.
A big question is funding.
The US Department of Education estimates that it will cost anywhere from $10 billion to $50 billion to wire the schools, buy more computers, and train teachers.
The federal government plans to put up several billion dollars in matching grants as seed money, says Linda Roberts, director of education technology for the US Department of Education. But she hopes that the majority of funding will come from states, communities, and the private sector.