Technology Push

Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Mike Kennedy

Keeping up with technology in the central office, the classroom and all points in between can improve school and university operations.

In the 33,000-student Irving (Texas) district, more than 1,200 digital surveillance cameras are being installed on 30 school campuses and other district facilities.

J. Pat Lamb, director of security in the Irving district, says the majority of cameras are at middle and high school campuses — Irving High School will have more than 100 cameras — but each of the district's 20 elementary schools will have at least three cameras: at the front door, in the office and on the playground.

“Our emphasis is on life safety, inside and outside buildings,” says Lamb. “We listen to what the principals say about where to place the cameras — where kids are getting into trouble.”

New systems like the one in Irving operate over the district's Internet-connected computer network, so administrators can view security camera output from their home computers, and outside agencies such as the police and fire departments also have access.

“There is a big deterrence factor for students,” says Lamb. “We want the kids to know that we are watching them.”

And when deterrence doesn't work, and an incident occurs, Lamb says the system enables security personnel to quickly find and review the stored digital video from the relevant cameras. “The images are very crisp,” he adds.

The camera saturation is one element of Irving's $4.2 million expenditure on technology to upgrade security. The schools there also have a system that checks the identity of campuses visitors and checks the names with databases of registered sex offenders.

Upon arriving at a school, a visitor provides a government-issued ID to a school receptionist, which is scanned into the school's system. If the name is not on the sex-offender database, the visitor gets a temporary ID badge with a photo.

“If students or anyone see someone in the school without a visitor badge, they immediately report it, and the person is escorted to the office,” says Lamb.

If the visitor's information turns out to be a match on the sex-offender list, the school follows an established procedure for determining if the visit is appropriate and will be permitted.

Since October, Lamb says, Irving schools have had 62,000 visitors, and the system has flagged about a dozen sex offenders.

“We're a public schoolhouse, and we want people to feel welcome,” says Lamb. “On the other hand, times are changing, and you have to be careful.”

Kennedy, staff writer, can be reached at mkennedy@asumag.com.

Letting information flow

A university campus is a wellspring of expertise and information. But relatively few people get a taste of all the knowledge available. A student might be getting a comprehensive education at an Ivy League school, but somewhere out there — in California, North Dakota or Poland, or maybe across campus in another department — is a professor or program with a unique outlook that could push the student to greater achievements.

Many higher-education institutions have decided that they don't want to confine what they have to offer to the borders of their campuses. The World Wide Web has erased those boundaries and enabled colleges and universities to share their information and resources with people, no matter how remote and distant.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge began MIT OpenCourseWare in 2002 as a pilot project when the teaching materials — syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams — from 50 courses were posted on the school's website (http://ocw.mit.edu). In November 2007, MIT announced that materials from 1,800 courses — virtually every course offered — had been put online as part of the OpenCourseWare program.

MIT says that about 35 million people have accessed course materials since the program began, and 60 percent of those are from outside the United States.

Yale University in New Haven, Conn., is offering seven introductory courses (astronomy, English, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology and religious studies) as part of its Open Yale Courses program (http://open.yale.edu/courses/index.html). Each course is available for free and includes high-quality video versions of class lectures and other course materials such as syllabi, suggested readings and problem sets. The lecture videos can be downloaded, and an audio-only version and lecture transcripts also are available.

The program was begun, the school says, because “Yale … believes that leading universities can make an important contribution to expanding access to educational resources through the use of Internet technology.”

Yale plans to add about 30 more courses in the next three years.

In February, the University of Indiana unveiled an online site, http://podcast.iu.edu, where Internet users can find audio or video podcasts from faculty and staff at all of the IU campuses. The podcasts include lectures, music, radio broadcasts, virtual museum tours and other information from university programs.

Interactive whiteboards

In the pre-computer era, schools had chalkboards or overhead projectors that teachers used to display information to a classroom of students. With the widespread availability of computers in classrooms, the information that teachers want to display or add to often is on a computer monitor. The solution for more and more schools is to install interactive whiteboards.

The boards enable instructors to project a computer onto a screen and use markers or styluses to add information to the projected image. Teachers can combine the spontaneity of writing on a chalkboard or whiteboard with the images and data unearthed via computer from the deep resources of the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of interactive whiteboards have been installed in classrooms of K-12 and higher-education campuses.

“Interactive whiteboards allow teachers to illustrate curriculum information visually, reinforce English vocabulary, and provide students opportunities to interact with a variety of visual media,” says the Fairfax County (Va.) district's technology plan for 2008. “While well-chosen visual information for some students enriches their learning experiences, for others it provides critical information that clarifies confusions and allows them to understand the information being taught.”

In December, the Greenwich (Conn.) school system announced that it was installing interactive whiteboards in all classrooms from grades 3 to 12. The plan covers 15 schools and is expected to take four years.

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