Technology , K-12 Education and Community
Doug
Grant with the
assistance of Gil Vickery
Littleton
December
13, 2004
Effective education has a lot to do with communication. A recent study performed by UNH for the North Country (Androscoggin Valley) showed that at least 35% of a selection of parents wanted more opportunities to participate in school planning and provide input into education issues. How is this going to happen?
Many people value systemic attributes like transparency and openness. The enlightened public also encourages public participation, especially when dealing with a powerful bureaucracy that often does not seem to have a face. How is this going to be overcome?
When we think about the business of education, we think of interactions between students, teachers, parents, administrators, the school board, and the public. The business world generally utilizes information technology via computers, PDA's, and mobile phones to standardize and keep track of communications. Recently, in several conversations with Gil Vickery, he and I explored some ways that technology could be utilized more effectively in the context of the school system.
Gil is blind. He can read email quite well, so he frequently asks his children’s teachers and school administrators to send report cards and other official communications via email. This is always a “special” request and does not seem to ever become a routine requirement.
Is Gil’s request unique?
Suppose email were the norm, and parents and students were requested to supply email addresses in order to receive a variety of communications from the school? This would mean a more direct method of delivering content. It would also lift the burden from the student, the historical means of delivery. Who has not received student deliveries late or covered with mud?
What about the parents who do not have or will not use email? This is a challenging problem for society as a whole. We do (to some extent) acknowledge that people are not required to have cars or telephones, but we do not necessarily make exceptions for them. One of the interesting sites Gil and I have looked at (http://www.hipschools.com ) offers a system that provides a telephone-based alternative to email. Another possibility is simply to retain the present ad hoc methods for people who abstain from email. Another is to get the students themselves involved in educating their parents (or other kids’ parents, for that matter.).
Email is cheaper to send than US mail. It is cheaper to discard. It does not consume as much resources as pieces of paper do. I do not know how much mail the Littleton school systems send to parents, teachers, and students each year, but if half of these communications could be via email rather than US mail a significant savings could be realized.
There are many other ways in which making email an effective two-way path would increase communication between the school and its constituents. How often do students bring home a new policy directive? In our opinion, all policies should be distributed in advance and discussion solicited. Email would facilitate this since the marginal costs would be so low. Email would also facilitate communicating with both parents when divorce or another event has separated them.
School board meetings and agendas could be publicized cheaply. Routine announcements, homework assignments, grades, absences from school, club announcements, permission slips – all these communications can be facilitated.
Littleton has places where anyone can come and use a computer (Techlink NH, Littleton Public Library, possibly the Learning Center, and public Wi-Fi access is becoming available). We should establish a volunteer learning center where adult learners could get whatever missing computer skills they may need. Some of this may already exist at NHCTC and CLL, but we believe that computer literacy is a lot like reading literacy, driving literacy, or drinking literacy. I think that society gives literacy lessons free. I think that Gil gets his services for the blind free.
A public web site would be a valuable adjunct to the email piece. We envision that a web site could be used for.
School calendar
School lunch
Bus routes
Grandparents come to school events
School board meetings and agendas
Sports events and results
Webcasting
You fill in the blank
This one too
An excellent example of a local school website is Profile School.
Students could become involved in web site
maintenance
assuming security controls were adopted. There is a notion that a
"portal" is required. Portal has lost all meaning. Normally, web sites
are protected via security.
A web component could also replace email, if a secure login system were implemented. This naturally leads to questions of appropriate use, email ethics, do’s and don’ts, etc. Technology use, just like learning to drive, needs a “rules of the road” component for all participants.
Increasing communication within the school system and the large number of people that it is connected to is in itself the “right thing to do.” The school system frequently expresses the idea that it wants to communicate better.
For this proposal to become more than an idle thought, community and school participation is required and a steering committee needs to be put together and supported by the various stakeholders.
Gil and I would be happy to contribute our expertise to such an effort. The basic requirements can IMHO be performed by a system including a connection to a DBMS, an SMTP connection, a local LDAP database, and a set of security policies A local PHP expert would also be useful. There are other user interfaces which would have to be specified..
Doug Grant is at doug@doug-grant.us
Gil Vickery is at gil@techlinknh.org