| AT&T rolls out U-verse in Detroit |
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AT&T Inc. today announced that it is launching its U-verse combined TV, voice and data service in the Detroit area. AT&T says it is the only national provider of a 100 percent Internet Protocol-based TV service. It will be available in portions of more than 50 communities, reaching from Northville to the west to Rochester Hills to the south to Grosse Pointe to the east to Trenton in the south. AT&T says it will continue to increase availability throughout the area on an ongoing basis. AT&T U-verse offers customers a combination of next-generation digital television -- including access to more than 25 high definition channels, and high speed Internet access. "It's an IP network for the home, and on that IP network wlll be a variety of applications, one of which is television," said Jennifer Jones, AT&T vice president and general manager for Michigan. Included will be more than 300 TV channels, with improved picture clarity; video music channels in a variety of formats; high-speed Internet, featuring a wireless gateway for the home; and voice service that will soon be migrated to Voice Over Internet Protocol. The service will be provided through regular copper phone wires, connected to VRADs -- those new, larger tan phone boxes that have been replacing the old pale green phone switching boxes around the Detroit area for months now. Massive fiber optic bandwidth is connected to those VRADs, which will be able to provide U-verse service to any home within about 2,000 feet of them. Pricing of the U-verse service starts at $44 a month, and AT&T pledges plans will be competitive with Comcast Corp.'s "Triple Play" TV-data-voice service. The standard offer includes three Motorola-built set-top boxes to bring the high-tech IPTV to individual sets. Importantly, it also includes a digital video recorder capable of holding 120 hours of video content. And, AT&T said the service will also be available through the Web and AT&T cell phones, with users able to record TV, set or change parental controls and more from the computer or phone. The interface features an extremely high-tech look and feel, which AT&T first showed at the January 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. Included are picture-in-picture and semi-transparent menus, searches by program name or actor's name, one-touch recording, and the ability to record up to four programs at a time -- while watching a fifth. There are also hundreds of video-on-demand movies available at $2 to $4 a day, or $3 to $5 for a three-day rental. Jones also assured GLITR that the service will provide local cable access channels to schools and communities -- although those schools and communities must take the initiative to send their content to AT&T for display on TV channels. The system will carry no long-term contract, and will offer a 60-day money-back guarantee, Jones said. And it's available in Spanish. AT&T also says it plans to add more channels and interactive applications in the future. Now through June 30, qualified new customers can join AT&T U-verse and receive free TV service, including HBO and Cinemax, for the first two full months when they choose the U300 or U400 programming package. Thereafter, customers will continue to receive regular recurring monthly discounts on their U-verse package when they subscribe to a bundle of TV and Internet services. Also, customers who order U-verse TV and Internet by phone receive free professional installation. • Elite: Downstream up to 6.0 Mbps, upstream up to 1.0 Mbps. Subscribers also receive virtually unlimited e-mail storage and powerful anti-virus and anti-spam software. |
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Don't Ask!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Boy's are from Mars, Girls are from Venus? AIM is the Solution!
(WILLIAM ARCHIE/Detroit Free Press)
Andrew Hanagan, left, and John Robinson, both 15, prepare to buzz in during a contest in English class May 9 at Canton High. The contest is aimed at helping boys learn grammar by turning it into a game. Schools in the Plymouth Canton district are trying new ways to teach boys.
Boys can make the grade, if they're not bored
May 21, 2007
There's a big difference in Pamela Dean's English 9 class at Salem High School when Grammar Bowl begins.
The boys clamber over desks and race for the chairs, sitting with shoulders hunched forward, buzzers clutched in hand. On a recent day, the boys beat the girls to the buzzer for 42 out of 45 questions.
That level of engagement doesn't usually happen in English classes, where girls typically far outperform boys on testing. But turn it into a sport, and suddenly the boys get it.
Plymouth Canton Community Schools is one of the few districts in the metro area making a dramatic effort to change how boys are taught in response to research showing they learn differently than girls.
"You can teach boys anything as long as you don't do it in a boring way," said Sharon Strean, assistant principal for curriculum and instruction at the district.
The district is encouraging more competition in the classroom and finding ways to make lessons more hands-on, all rooted in studies that suggest physiological differences in the brains of boys and girls are the main reason an acheivement gap between genders exists in some subjects.
"This isn't about boys versus girls. It's about identifying who the students are and identifying their strengths and potential," said Richard Weinfeld, an educational consultant and the author of "Helping Boys Succeed in School." "As we're able to do more brain research, we see more differences between male and female brains."
Right brain, left brain
The research Strean cites shows that boys tend to be right-brain dominant, making them better able to deal with spatial thinking and more mechanically inclined. Testosterone tends to make them more aggressive and competitive.
In girls, the left brain, which deals with verbal skills, tends to be dominant. Physiological differences, research shows, also make girls' brains more inclined to regulate anger and aggression and more involved with emotion and memory.
A 2006 Vanderbilt University study found girls had an advantage over boys when tests and tasks were timed, something that's common in classrooms. The study showed boys fared better when studying interesting or challenging material in smaller chunks, and without hard and fast time limits.
In addition, female teachers outnumber male teachers about 3 to 1, according to the Michigan Education Association. The ratio is roughly the same in Plymouth Canton's secondary schools. And women, with the best of intentions, teach classes in ways that are compatible with their learning styles, Strean said.
The result? "School might not be as friendly a place for boys," Strean said.
Bring on the action
The solution, Strean said, was to add elements to the classroom that would engage boys' learning styles, such as more physical activity tied to lessons and less reliance on the lecture-recite mode. Programs such as Grammar Bowl were born out of that effort.
Frankie Dinicola, 15, a Salem 10th-grader and a member of last year's winning Grammar Bowl team, said he had little interest in grammar before the program began.
"When it was just a work sheet, just a lecture, yeah, it's boring," Frankie said. "To be honest, I didn't know much grammar."
Once grammar became a competition, his attitude and his learning curve shot way up.
"It kind of turned into a sport when we did our first competition," Frankie said. "Now every time someone says, 'You're doing good,' I'm like, 'No, you're doing well.' It annoys me now."
Jeffrey Blakeslee uses boy-friendly techniques in his advanced literature class on science fiction at Salem High. The course is always full -- and almost all the students are boys.
"When you assign something you can read, and you do it in the traditional style, the kids kind of fight it. It comes as a task," Blakeslee said. "Basically I open it up to any way they want."
Instead of writing papers, Blakeslee's students are more likely to be making movies, writing stories or playing trivia games about the books they read. The projects are not only creative, they're often more extensive than book reports.
"It's the fun stuff," said Brad Lawrence, 17, of Canton, adding Blakeslee's lectures were typically no more than 10 or 15 minutes long. "This class is really a shared activity English class."
Don't forget girls
Strean and other experts caution that while most girls and boys fall into these classifications, there are plenty of exceptions. And no one's talking about forgetting about girls -- it's important to mix teaching styles for both genders.
The gap is of concern because high-stakes tests, such as the MEAP, require more reading and writing, two female strengths, Weinfeld said.
"The skills we want kids to have at an earlier and earlier age, girls naturally have," Weinfeld said.
"People are concerned. Boys are dropping out more than girls, fewer boys are graduating from high school than girls, fewer boys are going to college than girls."
All kids could benefit from adding a little more movement in classrooms, said Cheryl Somers, assistant professor of educational psychology at Wayne State University.
There are no differences in intelligence between boys and girls, she said. While research shows some differences between male and female brains, research also shows that boys and girls are treated differently, from infancy on. Boys are bounced, girls are coddled. Boys fall down, girls are more protected, Somers said.
"I think a lot more of it has to do with temperament," Somers said.
"Boys are a lot more active. So if you're not doing something to stimulate them, they're going to tune out more, because they need more activity level."
"Kids come to school with these differences," Somers said. "No matter whether their parents are creating it or their biology is creating it, they come to school like this. So let's figure it out."
Contact PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI at 586-469-4681 or pwalsh@freepress.com.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
Understanding different learning styles
Teachers in Plymouth Canton Community Schools use these findings to help them determine how to teach boys and girls.
Boys
• Don't remember as well as girls, so give them lists, graphics, categories
• Are more easily bored, so vary lessons and make them more action-based
• Movement stimulates their brains and relieves impulsive behavior
• Work silently, and may be quiet in cooperative groups
• Hear slightly less well and require clear, direct evidence
• Think deductively and think fast
• Think pecking orders are important
Girls
• Brains have 15% more blood flow, so they continue to take in information while at rest
• Produce more words than boys
• Are better listeners and hear more of what is said
• Handle details well
• Are inductive thinkers, so they begin with concrete examples
• Find cooperative learning easier
• Pay attention to the groups' social order
Source: Plymouth Canton Community Schools
Falling behind girls
Here are some national trends:
• Two-thirds of students in special education are boys.
• Boys receive the majority of D's and F's.
• Boys make up 80% of the discipline problems and make up 80% of those diagnosed with behavior disorders.
• On average, boys are 18 months behind girls in reading and writing.
• Boys make up 80% of high school dropouts.
• Boys make up 44% of college graduates. Because of the way that number is dropping, some predict that boys soon could make up just 30% of college graduates.
Sources: U.S. Department of Education, Richard Weinfeld, Michigan Department of Education, and "The Minds of Boys" by Michael Gurian.
Ways to encourage boys to read more
• Use audiobooks and text-to-speech software.
• Provide outlines, graphic organizers and other visual aids.
• Let them see males in their own family reading.
• Leave books and other reading material that might appeal to them lying around.
• Encourage reading online.
• Allow reading to be private.
• Subscribe to a magazine that might interest them.
• Give books as a gift, alone or in combination with a related gift -- for example, a soccer ball and soccer book.
• Let them make choices at the library or bookstore. Don't criticize their interests.
• Let them pick books that are too hard or too easy.
• Look for books with lists, facts, action, and humor and about the sciences.
• Read aloud to them about a topic that they want to learn more about.
• Do an activity or project and then read to find out more information about the topic.
Source: "Helping Boys Succeed in School" by Richard Weinfeld (Prufrock, 2007)
NSF Grant / IT, Innovation & Entrepreneurship
| Lansing town hall aims to create 'innovation economy' |
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The MMIT is a $15 million, three-year initiative funded by the United State Department of Labor's Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development initiative.
The WIRED initiative focuses on regions, within and across states -- communities willing to join forces for a critical mass of assets and institutions to make economic transformation possible.
And he said there also needs to be more regional cooperation. The little three-county regions of which the MMIT is comprised -- the three counties around Lansing, the three counties around Midland, Bay City and Saginaw, the three counties of the Thumb -- "are not big enough to win in the global economy. You don’t have enough assets on your own," Kempner said.
The town hall concluded with breakout sessions on the four economic areas identified in the MMIT implementation plan -- advanced manufacturing, the bio-economy, health care and entrepreneurship -- and a presentation on automotive information from David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor.
More at http://www.midmiinnovationteam.org/. |
Sunday, May 20, 2007
NSF ITEST Grant (Leverage Opportunity)
(January photo by MANDI WRIGHT/Detroit Free Press)
State scales back governors conference
Nation's governors to gather near Traverse City in a low-key affair
May 20, 2007
The nation's governors plan to meet near Traverse City this summer, but their July 20-23 conference will bear little resemblance to the razzle-dazzle that greeted the chief executives 20 years ago.
In 1987, the state's economy had emerged from the recession of the early 1980s. It was Michigan's 150th birthday and then-Gov. Jim Blanchard was determined to show the nation's governors a good time.
Back then, the state paid $500,000 to put on the National Governors Association conference. There were parades, concerts at Interlochen, fireworks, a tall ships regatta and a Motown revue.
A little-known Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, who was chairman of the group, showed his musical chops, joining the Four Tops with a riff on his tenor saxophone.
Twenty years later, Michigan's economy is skidding and there's no state money to promote gala events. There will be parties and plenty of chances to show off Michigan's splendor, but the money will come from private donations raised by the state's NGA host committee, said Liz Boyd, spokeswoman for Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Last year, Charleston, S.C., raised $1.2 million in private money to host the annual meeting.
Even with Michigan's economic travails, Granholm will be propelled into the national spotlight as the host of the event.
"Hosting this year's NGA annual meeting in Traverse City is a terrific chance for us to use a national spotlight to showcase Michigan and all we have to offer -- from our new economy, high-tech businesses to our spectacular natural environment," Granholm said. "The state is feeling some challenges, but it's the perfect time to highlight the work we are doing to implement our economic plan."
While Blanchard whisked his Democratic colleagues and Democratic candidates for president to the governor's sweet summer digs on Mackinac Island for a meeting after the official event, Granholm has no such plans."We're going to promote Michigan, but it's a different time and we're approaching it as a business meeting," Boyd said. "It's not a time for lavish parties."
The NGA host committee is lining up corporate sponsors to pay for the parties and the security needed to keep the 35-40 governors expected to attend the conference safe. That's appropriate, given the economic times, Blanchard said.
"We were trying to show people a Michigan they had never seen, so we used it to promote tourism and manufacturing in Michigan," he said of the 1987 conference. "It's a great way to show off the state's assets."
The tentative schedules of both the NGA and the state host committee will be released later this week, but there are plans for social events for the 1,200 people expected to attend the conference on Friday and Saturday. And the Chateau Chantal winery on the picturesque Old Mission Peninsula is planning a corporate-sponsored party and dinner for the governors on Sunday evening, featuring a strolling dinner and wines of the region.
"I know what they're hoping to do is give people a flavor of what Up North Michigan is really like. People have a very industrialized image of Michigan," said Liz Berger, operations manager for the winery. "But we're rather idyllic and pastoral."
The event is to take place about sunset and the governors will then be bused to the tip of the peninsula for a bonfire "and maybe some marshmallows," Berger said.
Governors, their staff, and representatives from the federal and state governments, White House, think tanks and the news media covering the event will encounter a newly renovated Grand Traverse Resort and Spa, with $12 million in upgrades done in the last four years."The renovations would have been done regardless of the convention," said J. Michael DeAgostino, spokesman for the resort, which is owned by the Grand Traverse band of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. "But we'll turn over the entire facility to the NGA."
Traverse City also is a different place than it was 20 years ago, when the NGA conference was one of the biggest events hosted in the city to date.
Now the hotels are filled most of the summer and big events are commonplace. Running the same time as the NGA is the three-week Horse Show by the Bay, a national equestrian event that is expected to attract 750 horses and 1,500 spectators.
"It's July in Traverse City and I'm right on the beach. We would be full without the NGA conference," said Chris Gorence, general manager of the Sugar Beach and Grand Beach Resort hotels. "The positive effect it will have on us is that it will drive people to come here on other weekends in the summer."
The four-day event, however, isn't all fun. The governors will get down to the business of electing new leadership. Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican of Minnesota, will take over as chairman from Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat of Arizona. And they will focus on the theme "Innovation America."
"It's a good fit for Michigan," said Jodi Omear, spokeswoman for the NGA. "It's all about revitalizing the economy with things like alternative energy."
The star power among governors isn't high, unless you're talking about former movie star and current California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his attendance isn't a sure bet.
While the NGA likes to keep the conference nonpartisan and won't host any presidential forums, wherever a group of elected officials gather, politics is sure to follow. When the meeting was held in Charleston last year, there were four sitting governors considering a run for the White House -- Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, George Pataki of New York, Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Bill Richardson of New Mexico. Political events were as plentiful as policy discussions.
Richardson is the only sitting governor still in the race, though Romney, also still in the race, could attend as a former governor.
"We discourage them from doing anything during the meeting," Omear said. "But I'm sure there will be things before and after the conference."
Contact KATHLEEN GRAY at 313-223-4407 or gray@freepress.com.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
STEM and a little Innovation. Let there be LIGHT!
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Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages
FUGNIDO, Ethiopia — At 10 p.m. in a sweltering refugee camp here in western Ethiopia, a group of foreigners was making its way past thatch-roofed huts when a tall, rail-thin man approached a silver-haired American and took hold of his hands.
The man, a Sudanese refugee, announced that his wife had just given birth, and the boy would be honored with the visitor’s name. After several awkward translation attempts of “Mark Bent,” it was settled. “Mar,” he said, will grow up hearing stories of his namesake, the man who handed out flashlights powered by the sun.
Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.
His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.
Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.
Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.
“I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light,” Mr. Bent said. “If you’re an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you’re a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you’re an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night.”
Here at Fugnido, at one of six camps housing more than 21,000 refugees 550 miles west of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Peter Gatkuoth, a Sudanese refugee, wrote on “the importance of Solor.”
“In case of thief, we open our solor and the thief ran away,” he wrote. “If there is a sick person at night we will took him with the solor to health center.”
A shurta, or guard, who called himself just John, said, “I used the light to scare away wild animals.” Others said lights were hung above school desks for children and adults to study after the day’s work.
Mr. Bent’s efforts have drawn praise from the United Nations, Africare, Rice University and others.
Kevin G. Lowther, Southern Africa director for Africare, the largest American aid group for Africa, said his staff was sending 5,000 of his lights, purchased by Exxon Mobil at $10 each, to rural Angola.
Dave Gardner, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said the company’s $50,000 donation in November grew out of an earlier grant it made to Save the Children to build six public schools in Kibala, Angola, a remote area of Kwanza Sul Province.
“At a dedication ceremony for the first four schools in June 2006,” Mr. Gardner said in an e-mail message, “we noticed that a lot of the children had upper respiratory problems, part of which is likely due to the use of wood, charcoal, candles and kero for lighting in the small homes they have in Kibala.”
The Awty International School, a large prep school in Houston, has sent hundreds of the flashlights to schools it sponsors in Haiti, Cameroon and Ethiopia, said Chantal Duke, executive assistant to the head of school.
“In places where there is absolutely no electricity or running water, having light at night is a luxury many families don’t have and never did and which we take for granted in developed countries,” Ms. Duke said by e-mail. Mr. Bent, a former Marine and Navy pilot, served under diplomatic titles in volatile countries like Angola, Bosnia, Nigeria and Somalia in the early 1990s.
In 2001 he went to work as the general manager of an oil exploration team off the coast of the Red Sea in Eritrea, for a company later acquired by the French oil giant Perenco. But the oil business, he said, “didn’t satisfy my soul.”
The inspiration for the flashlight hit him, he said, while working for Perenco in Asmara, Eritrea. One Sunday he visited a local dump to watch scavenging by baboons and birds of prey, and came upon a group of homeless boys who had adopted the dump as their home.
They took him home to a rural village where he noticed that many people had nothing to light their homes, schools and clinics at night.
With a little research, he discovered that close to two billion people around the world go without affordable access to light.
He worked with researchers, engineers and manufacturers, he said, at the Department of Energy, several American universities, and even NASA before finding a factory in China to produce a durable, cost-effective solar-powered flashlight whose shape was inspired by his wife’s shampoo bottle.
The light, or sun torch, has a narrow solar panel on one side that charges the batteries, which can last between 750 and 1,000 nights, and uses the more efficient light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.s, to cast its light. “L.E.D.s used to be very expensive,” Mr. Bent said. “But in the last 18 months they’ve become cheaper, so distributing them on a widespread scale is possible.”
The flashlights usually sell for about $19.95 in American stores, but he has established a BoGo — for Buy One, Give One — program on his Web site, BoGoLight.com, where if you buy one flashlight for $25, he will buy and ship another one to Africa, and donate $1 to one of the aid groups he works with.
Mr. Bent, who is now an oil consultant, lives in Houston with his wife and four young children. When he is not in the air flying his own plane, he is often on the road.
Traveling early this month in Ethiopia’s border area with Sudan, Mr. Bent stopped in each town’s market to methodically check the prices and quality of flashlights and batteries imported from China.
He unscrewed the flashlights one by one, inspecting the batteries, pronouncing them “terrible — they won’t last two nights.”
On his last day along the border, Mr. Bent visited Rapan Sadeeq, 21, a Sudanese refugee who is something of a celebrity in his camp, Bonga, for his rudimentary self-made radios, walkie-talkies and periscopes.
The two men huddled in the hut, discussing what parts would be needed to power the radio with solar panels instead of clunky C batteries. “Oh, I can definitely send you some parts,” Mr. Bent said. “You can be my field engineer in Ethiopia.”
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
AMEN! I Mean AIMen!
Students bring parents on board
May 16, 2007
The Detroit ninth-graders who pledged two months ago to graduate from high school on time, attend college and then return to help rebuild their city have taken the next step in their campaign.
The students gathered again Saturday at their school, University Preparatory Academy, this time bringing their moms and dads to sign contracts supporting their pledge.
Then the students had their teachers sign a contract to support them.
Finally, they asked their superintendent what he intended to do to help. And Doug Ross, who has run the 512-student charter high school since 2003, told them he would see to it that every student who graduated and earned at least a 20 on the ACT would get a full scholarship to college.
And that's when the parents and grandparents, who had been sitting in proud and appreciative silence, began to shout.
"This is excellent!" said Rachel Gaddy, mother of 15-year-old MaLia Gaddy, one of the student leaders who is helping to enlist every ninth-grader in Detroit to this movement.
"This means that she will have the opportunity to go to college and reach her goals because right now, I don't have the money to really help her to get to school. She wants that so much, and I want that for her. She's striving. She's doing all she can, doing community things, trying to make money and save what she can.
"It's like a miracle!"
UPA's 128 freshmen, who call themselves Detroit's Greatest Hope, reiterated the message with which they began their campaign: We are the future.
At the breakfast meeting where students took the podium to address their parents, they were as passionate as when I met them on the March day they first announced their plan. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick applauded them that day and promised to host their citywide summit, reminding them that "no revolutionary change ... has ever happened in world history without young people being at the genesis or nucleus of it."
"I made a pledge at 13 that I would be part of this city's history" after college, he said then. "We need some help, because too many people are dropping out, and we need some more people accepting the responsibility of making this city great. And I think that the right folks are in this 128-member class."
Students seek to recruit others
The charter school students' campaign comes as the mayor is seeking to establish more charter and private schools in Detroit to offer parents a choice between district schools that aren't meeting their goals and a better future for their children.
Detroit's problem isn't that the entire Detroit Public Schools system has failed. It is that only some of its schools are effective, and parents don't have an alternative when their kids are stuck with schools that don't work. Too often, they choose to leave the city.
Over the next year, the mayor has said he will meet with teachers, union leaders and parents to find a way to better meet what parents want and the city needs from its schools.
On Saturday, University Prep freshman David Miller updated parents on the campaign, telling them how the class has created a Facebook page online that tells other kids nationwide about their commitment and about the citywide summit they are planning so any ninth-grader can join the campaign.
Asia Bonney read the letter the students are sending to the student councils of every public, parochial and private high school in Detroit:
"Dear Class of 2010 Student Council Leader:
"Have you ever thought about living in a city without poverty, graffiti, litter, abandoned buildings and (with) schools where students don't drop out?
"We have.
"We are the University Preparatory High School Class of 2010, and we are ready to lead Detroit in a new direction.
"As you may or may not have heard, University Prep's ninth grade has pledged to graduate from high school, steer clear of gang activities and violence and go on to college. Our purpose? To become Detroit's Great Hope.
"We are regular Detroit schoolkids like you. We are concerned about Detroit's future because it's part of our future as well. We are dedicating ourselves to our city in order to make Detroit a positive place to live. We can't do it alone. That's why we are inviting you to join us in our pledge to initiate Detroit's transformation."
These kids are making history. What they are doing, these 14- and 15-year-olds, makes them leaders. They deserve the promise that Ross made to them Saturday.
"I will commit to raising the money to make sure that every member of the Class of 2010, after they have received all of the scholarship money they are eligible for, receives a Great Hope Scholarship from UPA that covers full college tuition for four years to any public university or college in Michigan," he said. "If this class achieves an average score on the ACT of 20 or higher, which is higher than Cass's (Cass Technical High School) average, I will do that.
"I know you can do it."
Changing lives, changing the city
The UPA high school opened four years ago with a daunting goal of graduating 90% of its freshmen and sending at least 90% of its seniors to college.
"Next month at our first graduation," Ross told the students, "we are going to meet that goal."
If the UPA students follow their contract, the school should have that success every year.
The student contract requires each student to come to school prepared in material and attitude; manage his or her time well by using a planner; commit to do two hours of homework each night; dedicate themselves to become leaders, and stay focused on college and the high performance standards needed to get there.
The parent contract requires parents to get their kids to school on time every day; participate in all parent meetings; make sure their children have a quiet place to do homework and to check that homework every night; get their kids involved in extracurricular activities, and praise good work.
Ross frankly told the parents that they had to make the choice that day whether the new mission was for them.
"If this sounds like more work than you want to do, if you'd rather forget the Great Hope Scholarship to avoid the pressure of getting a high ACT score, if you're not sure you can get here every day on time and turn in homework every day on time, then you may want to find another high school that demands less," he said.
"This class is in the process of making history," Ross told the parents. "They are in the process of transforming public education in this city. And I think it will be a life-changing process for every student who stays and makes the commitment."
It will be a city-changing process, too.
Contact ROCHELLE RILEY at 313-223-4473 or rriley99@freepress.com.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
AIM Program to debut in YOUR LIVING ROOM!
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Cable Operators Expand Local Programming
Filed at 9:22 p.m. ET
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Gloomy weather didn't dim the smiles of the two perfectly coifed TV anchors as they bantered into their microphone headsets.
''The skies may be gray, but spirits are sunny and bright. Good morning. I'm Janelle Wolfe and thanks for tuning in,'' one said with practiced, professional poise. ''It's going to be a long parade. I hope you have a bowl of popcorn or some beverages handy, because folks, we're going to be here a while.''
Macy's Thanksgiving Parade? Not even close. It's the 2006 bicentennial parade of Pottsville, Pa. The town's population: About 15,000. Here's another surprise: The show wasn't produced by the local TV station but taped and edited by Comcast Corp. It aired on the cable company's statewide video on demand service, which is a bank of stored movies, television shows and other content that its digital TV customers can access at any time.
Comcast, based in Philadelphia, and other cable operators such as Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems Corp. and Cox Communications Inc., are quietly expanding their local news coverage of the communities they serve, offering an alternative satellite rivals can't match and tapping into demand for everything local.
While the quality of the shows varies from ESPN sophistication to simple footage of cheerleading, they're generally slicker and more diverse than those seen on public access channels produced by the community. Many local on-demand shows are produced by the cable companies, using their own video crews and on-air anchors.
By offering local on demand, cable operators hope to give subscribers one more reason to stay with them.
Parents who miss their kids' Tuesday afternoon baseball game can watch, pause, replay it on video on demand as early as that night. The video is stored on servers in the cable company's network. Customers make selections with their TV remotes and get nearly instant gratification.
''It's something satellite can't do,'' said Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research Group, a technology research and consulting company. ''It's all about differentiation.''
Meanwhile, phone companies are spending billions of dollars to blanket the country with their own TV service but aren't yet in a position to offer much, if any, local video on demand.
Besides staying a step ahead of telephone companies and standing out from satellite, video on demand also is being used to entice customers into upgrading to more expensive digital TV packages.
''They want to convert folks from analog to digital,'' said Todd Chanko, an analyst from Jupiter Research. The key is to offer the ''deepest, widest amount of content as possible.''
In a meeting last week with analysts, Comcast executives said customers who buy digital cable tend to stay with the company. Digital subscribers who use video on demand are even more loyal.
Most local shows -- from high school sports and small-town parades to middle-school dance contests and community politics -- are free while newer movies carry a charge or require a movie channel subscription. On-demand movies are different from pay-per-view, where programming is broadcast on a schedule and usually only one viewing is allowed.
Last year, 54 percent of digital subscribers watched an on-demand program, according to the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing. That's up from 35 percent in 2004. About 35 million U.S. households subscribe to digital cable, according to Jupiter Research.
There aren't any industrywide figures yet for local video on demand, but cable companies said the shows have turned out to be quite popular.
''It's become a hot category for us,'' said Michael Doyle, president of Comcast's eastern division, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Just in the first quarter, Doyle's division recorded 2 million views for local video on demand. That compares with 3.7 million views for all of 2006 and 2.6 million in 2005. (A customer who clicks on an on-demand show and doesn't finish it but watches it again later would count as two views.)
While growing fast, local on demand is still a small percentage of the half a billion total views the Eastern division recorded in 2006. Nationally, Comcast posted 1.86 billion on demand views last year, up 33 percent from 2005.
Time Warner said viewership of its Wisconsin On Demand has at times exceeded those for the on-demand shows of Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and two premium channels, The Movie Channel and Playboy.
Excluding paid channels, the region-focused Wisconsin On Demand was the second most popular video on demand channel for Time Warner in the state, beaten only by children's channel PBS Kids Sprout, in the fourth quarter of 2006.
Wisconsin On Demand started with 50 shows in 2003 and now has about 400 shows. New York-based Time Warner said about two-thirds of its 27 geographic divisions carry local video on-demand shows, including lessons on fly fishing, outdoor grilling, dance contests and high school sports.
In March, Cablevision of Bethpage, N.Y., created a video on-demand category for its local shows, covering such events as high school sports, parades, festivals and political events. Its ''Meet The Leaders'' program has featured politicians from New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to Gary LaPelusa, city councilman for Bayonne, N.J.
It also airs ''Long Island's Most Wanted,'' to enlist the public's help in catching criminals.
Atlanta-based Cox, which is still rolling out video on demand to all its markets, said a bayou classic called ''Phat, Phat 'N All That Bayou'' is its most popular on-demand show in New Orleans. In April, Cox started offering local on-demand shows in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and surrounding Louisiana parishes. The video on-demand service became available in these areas in January.
By covering community events, cable operators are becoming a source of hyper-local news as television stations cut their news budgets. Newspapers cover much more local territory but are hampered by deteriorating finances.
''This was largely, at one time, the domain of local television,'' said Al Tompkins, who teaches broadcasting and online journalism at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. ''As local television has continually moved away from that connectivity, others have found ways to do it.''
Cable's advantage over local TV stations is that it doesn't care about ratings, Tompkins said. Its strategy is to make the cable TV service more enticing to folks by adding local content.
''What you're trying to do is you're trying to provide a unique service that they can't get if they don't get cable,'' he said. ''I can't get the Pottsville parade on CNN.''
Sunday, May 13, 2007
School In A Box Gains Traction, But WHAT About School OUT of the BOX?
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A Microsoft Alumnus Shares His Good Fortune
NEW DELHI
TARUN ANAND, the co-founder and chief executive of the Perfect Future, a start-up near Delhi, made his fortune in the United States, but returned to India to become an entrepreneur. He wants to use Web and mobile telephone technology to reform, or at least begin to improve, the uneven condition of education in his homeland.
I met Mr. Anand on a recent trip to India, where he introduced me to his company. Wearing a chartreuse cotton kurta, the traditional knee-length shirt of northern India, he arrived at my hotel and drove me through the squawking chaos of Delhi’s industrial suburbs.
Mr. Anand, who is 34, grew up in Delhi, where his father taught political science at the University of Delhi (his mother was a chemistry teacher at a local school). He was always a tinkerer and engineer. “At the age of 10, I built a film projector and watched strips of Indian cinema projected against a white wall,” he said. “Around the age of 14 I got hooked on computers and started programming.”
He learned computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and at the University of Texas, Austin. In 1995, he joined Microsoft, where he helped design a number of successful systems, including Windows NT and 2000, as well as Microsoft’s most important software development tools.
In 2001, Mr. Anand returned to India to work for Microsoft as a “technical evangelist,” with the unenviable job of persuading other software developers to embrace Microsoft’s technical standards, products and services. Even then, he said, he knew that he would eventually leave Microsoft to start his own business in India.
“I was honest with my boss, but I was building contacts and a network,” he told me.
He achieved limited institutional fame when he was named Microsoft’s Worldwide Software Architect of the Year in 2003. But the next year, when his stock options vested, he quit the company to start the Perfect Future.
Mr. Anand financed his company (which is named for a favorite book, “A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization,” by two Economist editors, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge) with $25,000 of his Microsoft money. He describes the venture as “dedicated to bringing innovative solutions to emerging markets.”
“That’s where the most demanding customers exist today,” he said. “Emerging markets also offer you the opportunity to experiment on both the mobile and Web platforms since the largest number of Web and mobile users exist in those markets.”
After a number of false starts, and, like so many Indian software firms, some service work (in this case, developing the Web site of The Hindustan Times), the start-up decided to focus on education.
“We realized that in Indian schools, children find education boring and static, and teachers and administrators are overburdened,” he said. “Parents are also out of touch with what’s happening. But most importantly, children are unprepared for real life.”
India’s international reputation for educating so many to high standards is deserved, and is the more remarkable in a nation whose per-capita income was $3,700 in 2006.
But that reputation disguises significant disparities.
According to India’s Department of School Education and Literacy, 90 percent of the country’s children enroll in school, but after five years in class around 50 percent of the students fail basic reading tests and are unable to perform single-digit subtraction. Ninety percent of Indian children drop out before they reach high school.
When I visited with Mr. Anand, his company had just moved out of a garage into its new offices (an undistinguished low-rise office block in a dry, sun-blasted field in an industrial park) and was weeks away from shipping its first branded product, called “School in a Box.” In the 115-degree heat of a Delhi afternoon (the air-conditioning in his company’s new offices had failed), Mr. Anand’s small team of programmers and educational advisers proudly showed me their answer to the problems of Indian education.
School in a Box offers Indian primary and upper primary schools (that is, for children from 5 to 14) an array of services which the Perfect Future hosts and manages. Teachers and others can use the services either on the Web, on mobile phones or even, in many cases, print them out at an Internet cafe and take them to school.
Among the tools that School in a Box users can deploy are simple text messages to notify school administrators, teachers, parents and children of important events; online student assessment tools; interactive question-and-answer examinations; and something called “activity-based learning,” or 25 games (most of them traditional and Indian) that teach children chemistry, physics and vocabulary.
By far the most interesting and radical element of School in a Box is how it attempts to promote Vedic mathematics, a system that Bharati Krsna Tirthaji Maharaja, a Hindu mathematician and scholar of the last century, claimed to have rediscovered in the Vedas, or Hindu sacred literature.
Vedic mathematics is controversial. It is associated with Hindu nationalism. The section of the Vedas where Mr. Tirthaji unearthed them is notoriously obscure, and some mathematicians believe that Mr. Tirthaji was a fabulist whose inventions distracted from the genuine achievements of ancient Indian mathematics.
While I am no great mathematician, Mr. Anand’s short tutorial revealed to me a system of remarkable power and elegance, ideally suited to calculations that must be performed without pen or paper.
Mr. Anand believes that traditional Indian learning, of which he thinks Vedic mathematics is an example, was suppressed by the British during their administration. “Most Indian children are unaware of the rich traditional knowledge and educational system of a great civilization,” he said.
The Perfect Future will earn money from School in a Box by charging schools about 15 Indian rupees, or around 40 cents, a month for each child, according to Mr. Anand. But he says the company will give away the service to the poorest schools or schools in rural areas.
Still, School in a Box, for all its high-minded promise, faces real challenges. To flourish, it would have to be purchased by Indian school administrators, who are typically conservative, and who have limited resources.
For his part, Mr. Anand believes that his service will succeed because it doesn’t threaten administrators, but will help them to do their jobs better. In the meantime, he is seeking the patronage of the minister of education for Delhi State, Arvinder Singh Lovely, whom he hopes will recommend School in the Box to administrators, and he is pursuing partnerships with other companies with interests in Indian education.
More tellingly, it’s not clear how much the new service can help Indian education. But for Mr. Anand, at least, it’s a start. “It’s not an easy task to uproot an existing system, no matter how bad, with a new one,” he argued. School in a Box, he said, won’t foment any revolution. “It was designed to bring an effective, affordable and user-friendly interface between technology and education.”
Tarun Anand is one member of an intriguing and growing group: Indians who have done well in the United States, and who, in preference to becoming even richer in their adopted country, have come home to see what commercial technology can do to improve the intractable problems of the subcontinent.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Let's HOPE They can COPY the IMPLEMENTATION!
Fenty's Plan Takes Verbatim From N.C.
By David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 9, 2007; A01
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's administration copied significant portions of its education strategy verbatim from a plan developed by a North Carolina school system, even as the mayor seeks to show he has the vision and expertise to restructure governance of the District's troubled public schools.
Fenty's 31-page document is a blueprint of his plans to improve students' academic performance. It contains passages that are virtually identical to some in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools' strategic plan -- including the opening statement describing the administration's vision. Fenty's document was submitted to the D.C. Council in late February in support of his proposal to take control of the public schools.
"In 2006, the United States produced six Nobel Prize winners," Fenty's vision statement begins. "All of them were educated in public schools. This is the standard of education that DCPS must strive to deliver." That passage, using "CMS" instead of "DCPS," appears on Page 7 of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg plan.
Victor A. Reinoso, Fenty's deputy mayor for education and a former school board member, issued a statement yesterday taking responsibility for the copying. He said: "In my eagerness to compile a compendium of successful reform initiatives, plans and best practices, I didn't properly attribute educational sources. . . . I am hopeful this oversight doesn't diminish the public's perception of the Administration's intent and ability to successfully manage and reform the District's Public School System."
Fenty knew that his aides were reviewing programs from other jurisdictions, spokeswoman Carrie Brooks said. It was unclear, however, whether the mayor knew that lines were copied verbatim.
Last month, the council passed legislation awaiting congressional approval that would reduce the power of the D.C. Board of Education and put Fenty in control of the 55,000-student system.
Some question the administration's ability to develop strategies for the District, whose system is smaller than the 130,000-student Charlotte-Mecklenburg system.
"I can understand using best practices, but I'd expect that a bit more original thought be put into a document of this importance," said Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), one of two council members who voted against Fenty's takeover.
The administration posted a note Friday on the D.C. government Web site stating that the document contains "language from" several school districts, including those in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, New York City and Denver. Specific language, however, is not attributed to a source or defined by quotation marks.
In Fenty's document, with "DRAFT" stamped on each page, strategies to create reading and math classes for middle school students, recruit teachers and use "secret shoppers" to judge how parents are treated by school employees come directly from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg plan.
The administration's proposal for a "data dashboard" with statistical indicators to enable "the public to see, at a glance, whether current improvement efforts are on track and to respond appropriately when problems arise" is lifted from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg document.
About 32 percent, or 8,000 words, of Fenty's document is borrowed, said John Barrie, spokesman for iThenticate.com, a plagiarism detection system designed to help non-academic institutions identify unauthentic material. The Washington Post requested that the company compare the two documents.
The similarities were first discovered by Carl Bergman, a former D.C. government deputy auditor. Bergman, who provided copies of his research to The Post and WAMU(88.5 FM), said he researched terms in Fenty's plan on the Internet because he was interested in some of the initiatives.
"It's quite unethical," he said.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg officials said Superintendent Peter C. Gorman, who took over last summer, developed the plan in November after discussions with more than 500 parents, teachers, education experts and consultants over 100 days.
Nora Carr, a spokeswoman for Charlotte-Mecklenburg, said: "We're glad they found things they could use in our program. The only caution I have is that it is critically important that plans are tailored to meet the individual needs of communities and students."
Before taking office, Fenty commissioned a study from the Parthenon Group, a management consulting firm, on the D.C. school system. Among the findings were charts that showed Charlotte-Mecklenburg leading all urban systems on test scores for reading and math.
Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, said that the plan Fenty is borrowing from is a brand-new effort whose effectiveness is unknown.
"It's not that city systems shouldn't borrow," Casserly said. "There's nothing wrong with that. It's admirable. You want to learn what succeeds other places, but this seems something short of that. That is not the plan that got Charlotte the gains."
21st Century School represents 'the will to change'
http://www.eschoolnews.com Contents Copyright 2007 eSchool News. All rights reserved.
21st-century school represents 'the will to change' How one district turned an ordinary building into an extraordinary opportunity for students By Corey Murray, Senior Editor, eSchool News April 30, 2007
At the end of a dimly lit corridor in the heart of the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering (AITE), a 450-student public high school in Stamford, Conn., a student stares into a camera lens. The wall behind him is plastered with dull green paper ripped from a giant spool in a nearby art classroom.
Two feet away, one of his classmates stoops behind a tripod, barking orders. He fusses with a small handheld camcorder, as a third student stands on a chair in a futile attempt to optimize the overhead lighting.
It might not look like much, say the students--not yet. But very soon, this ragtag movie set will be the birthplace of a short film chronicling a police inspector's globetrotting pursuit of a notorious jewel thief. Like the blue screens made famous by big-budget Hollywood blockbusters such as the Matrix trilogy, George Lucas's Star Wars, and other largely computer-generated classics, the unremarkable green backdrop serves as a sort of digital canvas, enabling the students--each of whom is enrolled in a class designed to teach the finer points of digital media arts--to test their creative boundaries.
Once they've captured the scene before the backdrop, the production team will hunker down in a nearby computer lab, where they'll employ a combination of software programs to digitally set the scene's surroundings--in this case, using Apple's Final Cut Pro software to drop in cultural images associated with several African nations, creating the appearance of a manhunt on the Serengeti.
At first blush, the production might seem a little crude, and--students will be the first to admit--the conditions are anything but optimal. But even amid such straight-to-DVD surroundings, they say, the skills they're gleaning through the use of these and other technologies at AITE will better prepare them for the future, a future in which blue-chip employers--including several of Hollywood's foremost production studios--are as committed to recruiting tech-savvy employees as they are to pleasing their shareholders.
Principal Paul Gross says the goal is to better equip students by giving them hands-on experience with technology, encouraging them to work in teams, and helping them attain the skills that business leaders agree are needed for success in the modern workforce.
Gross, along with educator and longtime advisor Christine Casey, helped launch AITE in 2000, looking to give students in Stamford and its surrounding community an alternative high school where they could explore emerging fields of study and pursue interests often ignored in the more traditional curricula of the city's other two high schools.
AITE isn't the only high school with an eye toward technology. Across the nation, more schools are cropping up with a high-tech focus. Last year, the City of Philadelphia celebrated the grand opening of its School of the Future, a $63 million, high-tech sanctuary for students in one of the city's roughest neighborhoods. Designed in partnership with software giant Microsoft Corp., that institution was built as a model that potentially could be replicated throughout the city--and, if all goes well, organizers contend, the nation. (See: 'School of the Future' opens doors)
In cities such as San Diego and Los Angeles, students continue to attend a growing number of "High-Tech High Schools," a chain of charter schools that emphasize project-based learning and technology integration as a way to better prepare students for the 21st century. That program currently operates nine schools--six high schools, two elementary schools, and one middle-school campus--throughout southern California. Of the system's approximately 2,500 students, administrators report that 100 percent of graduates go on to college, with 80 percent attending four-year institutions. (See: New 'high-tech' high schools aim to transform learning)
But despite the proliferation of these and other similar institutions, Gross says, what sets AITE apart are the circumstances under which it has succeeded: Whereas dozens of so-called "high-tech" schools have opened their doors in recent years, many in extravagant buildings, and often to great fanfare, teachers and students at AITE have had to work their way into the good graces of the local community--practicing creative budgeting and old-fashioned willpower to turn an ordinary school building into an extraordinary opportunity for students.
Getting there hasn't been easy. Though the state of Connecticut and the local community have contributed significant financial capital to help establish the magnet school--which attracts students not only from Stamford, but from other districts as well--the government's contribution covers only about one-third of the school's total operating budget each year, Gross said.
The money helps, he says--any source of funding helps. But for a school as ambitious as AITE, administrators knew early on they'd have to look beyond the local line-item budget.
In search of additional sources of funding, administrators began applying for state and federal grants, winning at least two awards that helped foot the bill for a myriad of high-tech amenities, including tablet PCs from Hewlett-Packard Co. for every child and school-wide wireless internet connectivity. Grant money also reportedly helped pay for additional staff development programs--initiatives Gross credits for helping AITE expand its curriculum and its overall use of technology.
But even grants can take a school only so far. Using a 40-year-old building they share with a neighborhood middle school, students and teachers at AITE are not accustomed to such luxuries as specially designed furniture, energy-efficient classrooms, and other architectural perks that often are associated with many of the nation's more modern facilities.
At AITE, students' desks are footed with tennis balls, so they can more easily be maneuvered into groups. The school has no television studio, and no futuristic classrooms outfitted with digital interactive whiteboards and other high-cost devices; throughout the building, light and heat seep from old windows and poor insulation.
Although much of that likely will change when the school moves into a brand-new, $43 million, 120,000-sqare-foot facility next year--an upgrade made possible only because the school has proven its merits--there is a lesson to be gleaned from the school's humble beginnings, Gross says: "It's just high school," he explains, as if reciting some sort of personal mantra.
Whether you have an old building or a gleaming new facility, the key to running a successful 21st-century school lies not primarily in the pizzazz of the latest technologies, but in the ability of teachers to make effective use of the resources at hand. What it comes down to, more than anything, says Gross, is the will to change. And if it can be done here, AITE leaders say, it can be done anywhere.
21st-century skills
One way AITE hopes to better prepare its students is through cultivating important, so-called "21st century" skills. Rather than have teachers blandly lecture students on topics from British literature to U.S. history, Gross encourages his staff to work as facilitators, bringing students together in teams to solve problems revolving around real-world scenarios.
Michelle Pusser, a social studies teacher in her first year at AITE, said the opportunity to teach in a project-based environment was what attracted her to the school.
"Everything we do here is student-centric, as opposed to teacher-centric," she said.
Working in a school where each student and every teacher has access to his or her own wireless tablet PC, teachers have the ability--and the freedom--to create situations where students routinely collaborate with classmates to complete assignments and turn in work.
Social studies teacher Claude Morest introduced a lesson on the Harlem Renaissance by having students work in groups to create interactive multimedia presentations profiling the period's most influential writers and poets. Students used everything from simple PowerPoint slides to audio and video clips spliced together with the aid of Microsoft's MovieMaker, a downloadable software program available free of charge online, to bring their subjects to life.
Junior Erronique Whyte said one of her favorite projects of the semester was partnering with classmates to create an interactive video about jazz singer Bessie Smith. Apart from the opportunity to learn about Smith's life, Whyte--an aspiring lawyer--said the exercise also gave her an opportunity to experiment with the kinds of technologies she suspects will benefit her in the years ahead.
"You have to learn technology in this school," she said. "When used appropriately, technology makes learning so much more convenient."
Down the hall, art and architectural design instructor Darin Tomaszewski strolls through a darkened classroom. On either side of him, students stare into computer screens, their faces tattooed with geometric shapes and images bouncing off the monitors in front of them. The program, Tomaszewski explains, is called AutoCAD, an architectural design tool from software maker Autodesk. Their assignment: to design their very own dream homes.
Though Tomaszewski's architectural design course culminates with students using the software to draft professional blueprints, he said, students spend the first half of the semester working with slide rules and drafting paper, learning--with their hands--how to master the tools of the trade. Only when they've conquered the basics does he let them move on to the computer.
"In every project, I try to prepare students for what they might face in their careers," he said.
And Tomaszewski is not alone. A quick glance through the AITE course catalog reveals a Chinese menu of options, many of which aren't typically offered in traditional high schools. Apart from core disciplines such as English, math, science, and social studies, which every AITE student must take for four years, the school also requires that students take four years of a foreign language. Options include the usual suspects, such as French, Spanish, and Latin--but the school also offers Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Arabic.
Students also can enroll in a wide array of advanced technical courses, ranging from robotics and civil engineering, to newspaper writing for the web, accounting, or advertising design, to even geographic information systems or web site production, among dozens of other electives.
As part of their experience at AITE, students can select between two academic "concentrations": information technologies (IT) or architectural and engineering.
The IT concentration offers a framework for pursuing core academic subjects, while at the same time taking a series of elective courses designed to expose students to the basics of computers and programming. Students enrolled in this strand also can take a variety of professional certification courses offered by the Cisco Networking Academy, Oracle, and other providers. Similarly, the architectural and engineering strand enables aspiring engineers to mix core studies with advanced courses in design and manufacturing. In both cases, educators say, the strands are intended to give students a competitive advantage heading into more rigorous, college-level courses.
Looking to expand the breadth of its course options further still, AITE also sponsors its own Virtual High School. These fully online courses are moderated by teachers stationed throughout the United States and, in some cases, the world. Technology Coordinator Jeanne Lauer, who facilitates the virtual school, said the online program was established to give overachievers a chance to take more advanced courses, while providing additional options, such as creative writing, for other students if they can't find what they're looking for within the building itself.
This year, Lauer said, at least 15 students are taking courses that aren't offered at AITE on a regular basis through the virtual school.
Virtual learning has proved a real boon for some students, she said, but experience has taught them the online model isn't for everyone.
"You need to be an independent learner and have good time-management skills," stressed Lauer. If students prove unable to manage their time effectively on their own, a teacher or guidance counselor can request that they complete all work for their online course at school, under the guidance of an in-class advisor.
No matter how students prefer to receive their instruction, school officials say, every course contains a strong dose of technology.
Throughout the school, every student has his or her own personal eMail account used to exchange information with teachers and classmates. An electronic drop-box feature lets students deposit homework and other assignments online, using their own tablet PCs. Online projects and digital portfolios are stored on the school's central network for password-protected access and group collaboration. And a classroom learning portal from eChalk enables each student to go online and access information relevant to his or her course of study.
Though the technology is a big draw for many AITE students, Gross and his staff are adamant in their belief that computers are just a tool--one that, when used judiciously, can go a long way in readying students for life and work in the 21st century, but a tool nonetheless. For these resources to be used effectively, teachers and students must understand the point at which sound instruction and technology meet.
Going global
Given an increasing emphasis on global competencies, the Connecticut-based magnet school encourages its students--and staff--to learn more about the world in which they live.
To do that, the school embraces technology and the internet to connect its student body with students in other countries. Currently, the school runs two cultural exchange programs--a three-year-old effort with students and teachers in Jiangdu High School, a Chinese school in the eastern province of Jiangsu, not far from Shanghai, and a recently announced partnership with an Egyptian high school.
As part of the international exchange program, students swap eMails and messages with students and teachers from other nations, posing questions about their culture, sharing personal stories, and trading ideas about teaching and learning. AITE also sent a delegation of teachers and students to Jiangsu to visit and meet their Chinese pen-pals face to face. Earlier this year, a group from Jiangdu returned the favor by paying a visit to Stamford.
Where the cross-cultural collaboration that goes on between AITE and its sister schools in other nations provides students with some interesting opportunities, educators say other activities, including a commitment to foreign language instruction, also play an important role. Unlike most public high schools, where students usually are required to take two years of a foreign language, AITE mandates that every one of its students commit to a language for four years.
Though it's unlikely a student who speaks only English as his or her native language would achieve fluency in a second language that quickly, educators say the extra time represents an opportunity to explore cultural differences, establish relationships with friends and colleagues in other parts of the world, and learn to appreciate what life is like in countries far different from their own.
As with just about everything else at AITE, foreign language instructor Anna Koltypin says technology is central to the program's success.
During a recent lesson on Russian culture, for example, Koltypin decided to teach her students about Pysanky, a Ukrainian tradition that employs religious symbolism in the practice of painting Easter Eggs.
Before spending a class period painting their own eggs, she said, many students opted to work on the computer, researching relevant religious symbols on the internet and using a software program called Alias, a three-dimensional graphics tool, to sketch out their concept designs. They then tried to recreate their initial visions by hand in the traditional Ukrainian style.
Spanish teacher Carl Nilson says his students use the internet to read about current events reported in Spanish newspapers. One of his favorite resources is a free program from the University of Texas at Austin. The web site, accessible at http://www.laits.utexas.edu/spe, features dozens of video clips of Spanish-speaking students reciting sentences in their native dialect.
By employing the site in his classroom, Nilsen says, his students are able to pronounce difficult words--and, later, apply those pronunciations to their own translations.
"It's good because it allows the students to hear the language used in context," explained Nilsen.
Shaping the future
And just how important is context? At AITE, teachers say all the technology in the world would be worth little if students proved unable to apply what they've learned outside of school.
Operating under the assumption that only so much learning can take place inside the four walls of the classroom, AITE continually works with local businesses and corporations to provide its students with internships and other opportunities designed to help them apply their newfound knowledge in a professional setting.
Whereas classrooms are good incubators, Gross says, the surest way to prepare students for life and work outside of school is firsthand exposure.
From the moment they enroll at AITE, students are encouraged to begin thinking about their future. Apart from offering courses in leadership and professional training, the school also gives students the option of participating in a Career Pathways program. Organized as a framework with a 10-year outlook, the program encourages students to think long-term about their educational goals, choosing a "pathway" that will take them through high school, into college and, eventually, the workforce.
Though the Pathways program doesn't lock students into a particular career choice, it does encourage them to embrace the mindset of "lifelong learners," said AITE's Lauer. Rather than setting a series of short-term goals, such as attaining a high school diploma or passing a particular class, Pathways is designed to help students expand their horizons with an eye toward the challenges that lay ahead.
As part of the initiative, students are encouraged to enroll in courses at local community colleges. Not only do they have a chance to earn college credit for work they do in high school, Lauer says, but the program also gives them a rare opportunity to experience firsthand the rigor and competitiveness they'll encounter on a university campus.
Internships also are an integral part of the student experience at AITE. Armed with the technical acumen acquired in courses dedicated to web design, computer programming, and other hands-on disciplines, several students have ventured into the community, successfully securing paid internships, apprenticeships, and work-study programs that potentially could lead to full-time jobs after college.
After coming to AITE with little knowledge, or interest, in web site design, senior Bryant Irby has gone on to develop and manage a web site for Soundwaters, a Stamford-based nonprofit dedicated to educating students and the public about Long Island Sound and its surrounding watershed.
Tenth-grader Scott Preston, who enrolled in AITE for his interest in web design and computers, recently was contracted by the city government to help redesign part of its web site.
Though these might seem like extreme cases, Gross says, such accomplishments are not beyond the realm of possibility for AITE students. When it comes to their potential, he says, they are limited only by the extent of their own ambitions.
Andrew Kostin, a junior who plans to apply for an internship program through UBS, the international investment firm and a major employer in the Stamford area, said he sees himself as an entrepreneur. His goal: to one day head a Fortune 500 company.
"It's possible," said Gross with a smile. After all, "it's only high school."
Links:
Academy of Information Technology and Engineeringhttp://ait.echalk.com/home.aspx
High Tech Highhttp://www.hightechhigh.org
School of the Futurehttp://www.microsoft.com/education/schooloffuture.mspx
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Saturday, May 05, 2007
Alas, Another "Side" of the Computing Story!
Jim Ross
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Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops
LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).
Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.
So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.
Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.
“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”
Liverpool’s turnabout comes as more and more school districts nationwide continue to bring laptops into the classroom. Federal education officials do not keep track of how many schools have such programs, but two educational consultants, Hayes Connection and the Greaves Group, conducted a study of the nation’s 2,500 largest school districts last year and found that a quarter of the 1,000 respondents already had one-to-one computing, and fully half expected to by 2011.
Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.
Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.
Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.
Matoaca High School just outside Richmond, Va., began eliminating its five-year-old laptop program last fall after concluding that students had failed to show any academic gains compared with those in schools without laptops. Continuing the program would have cost an additional $1.5 million for the first year alone, and a survey of district teachers and parents found that one-fifth of Matoaca students rarely or never used their laptops for learning. “You have to put your money where you think it’s going to give you the best achievement results,” said Tim Bullis, a district spokesman.
Everett A. Rea Elementary School in Costa Mesa, Calif., where more than 95 percent of students are Hispanic and come from low-income families, gave away 30 new laptops to another school in 2005 after a class that was trying them out switched to new teachers who simply did not do as much with the technology. Northfield Mount Hermon School, a private boarding school in western Massachusetts, eliminated its five-year-old laptop program in 2002 after it found that more effort was being expended on repairing the laptops than on training teachers to teach with them.
Two years ago, school officials in Broward County, Fla., the sixth-largest district in the country, shelved a $275 million proposal to issue laptops to each of their more than 260,000 students after re-evaluating the costs of a pilot project. The district, which paid $7.2 million to lease 6,000 laptops for the pilot at four schools, was spending more than $100,000 a year for repairs to screens and keyboards that are not covered by warranties. “It’s cost prohibitive, so we have actually moved away from it,” said Vijay Sonty, chief information officer for the district, whose enrollment is 37 percent black, 31 percent white and 25 percent Hispanic.
Here in Liverpool, parents have long criticized the cost of the laptop program: about $300,000 a year from the state, plus individual student leases of $25 a month, or $900 from 10th to 12th grades, for the take-home privilege.
“I feel like I was ripped off,” said Richard Ferrante, explaining that his son, Peter, used his laptop to become a master at the Super Mario Brothers video game. “And every time I write my check for school taxes, I get mad all over again.”
Students like Eddie McCarthy, 18, a Liverpool senior, said his laptop made him “a lot better at typing,” as he used it to take notes in class, but not a better student. “I think it’s better to wait and buy one for college,” he said.
More than a decade ago, schools began investing heavily in laptops at the urging of school boards and parent groups who saw them as the key to the 21st century classroom. Following Maine’s lead in 2002, states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and South Dakota helped buy laptops for thousands of students through statewide initiatives like and “Classrooms for the Future”“Freedom to Learn.” In New York City, about 6,000 students in 22 middle schools received laptops in 2005 as part of a $45-million, three-year program financed with city, state and federal money.
Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.
But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.
In one of the largest ongoing studies, the Texas Center for Educational Research, a nonprofit group, has so far found no overall difference on state test scores between 21 middle schools where students received laptops in 2004, and 21 schools where they did not, though some data suggest that high-achieving students with laptops may perform better in math than their counterparts without. When six of the schools in the study that do not have laptops were given the option of getting them this year, they opted against.
Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom” (Teachers College Press, 2006), also found no evidence that laptops increased state test scores in a study of 10 schools in California and Maine from 2003 to 2005. Two of the schools, including Rea Elementary, have since eliminated the laptops.
But Mr. Warschauer, who supports laptop programs, said schools like Liverpool might be giving up too soon because it takes time to train teachers to use the new technology and integrate it into their classes. For instance, he pointed to students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online.
“Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research,” he said. “If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.”
In Liverpool, a predominantly white school district of nearly 8,000 students, one in four of whom qualify for free or reduced lunches, administrators initially proposed that every 10th through 12th-grade student be required to lease a laptop, but decided to make the program voluntary after parents protested. About half the students immediately signed up; now, three-quarters have them.
At first, the school set up two tracks of classes — laptop and non-laptop — that resulted in scheduling conflicts and complaints that those without laptops had been shut out of advanced classes, though school officials denied that. In 2005, the school went back to one set of classes, and bought a pool of 280 laptops for students who were not participating in the lease program.
Soon, a room that used to be for the yearbook club became an on-site repair shop for the 80 to 100 machines that broke each month, with a “Laptop Help Desk” sign taped to the door. The school also repeatedly upgraded its online security to block access to sites for pornography, games and instant messaging — which some students said they had used to cheat on tests.
Maureen A. Patterson, the assistant superintendent for instruction, said that since the laptop program was canceled, she has spoken to more than 30 parents who support the decision
and received five phone calls from parents saying they were concerned that their children would not have technological advantages. She said the high school would enlarge its pool of shared laptops for in-class use, invest in other kinds of technology and also planned to extend building hours in the evening to provide computer access.
In a 10th grade English class the other day, every student except one was tapping away on a laptop to look up food facts about Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Burger King for a journal entry on where to eat. The one student without a computer, Taylor Baxter, 16, stared at a classmate’s screen because she had forgotten to bring her own laptop that day.
But in many other classrooms, there was nary a laptop in sight as teachers read from textbooks and scribbled on chalkboards. Some teachers said they had felt compelled to teach with laptops in the beginning, but stopped because they found they were spending so much time coping with technical glitches that they were unable to finish their lessons.
Alice McCormick, who heads the math department, said most math teachers preferred graphing calculators, which students can use on the Regents exams, to laptops, which often do not have mathematical symbols or allow students to show their work for credit. “Let’s face it, math is for the most part still a paper-and-pencil activity when you’re learning it,” she said.
In the school library, an 11th-grade history class was working on research papers. Many carried laptops in their hands or in backpacks even as their teacher, Tom McCarthy, encouraged them not to overlook books, newspapers and academic journals.
“The art of thinking is being lost,” he said. “Because people can type in a word and find a source and think that’s the be all end all.”