Get Connected - April 2008 - (Page 10)

Continued from cover The End of a Bottleneck: OCPS’ BLASTT Program “It’s not just a growth in reading skills. Yes, that’s happening, but the overall growth that I’ve found most exciting with the BLASTT program is students’ ability to collaborate with each other and use technology in order to solve problems.” —Denise Cruz, OCPS Technology Integration Specialist the classroom,” says Perreault. As an example, says Perreault, “prior to the new network, it was simply not possible for an entire classroom of students to effectively access a website simultaneously. Our goal is fostering constant innovation and utilizing educational technology to prepare our students for the 21st century, and this increased bandwidth to all our schools enables us to make that a reality.” Having a BLASTT One OCPS program that’s been given an enormous boost by the new super-charged network is a Web-based literacy and learning initiative called BLASTT, an acronym for Building Literacy and Skills Through Technology. OCPS Technology Integration Specialist Denise Cruz developed the innovative program three years ago for sixth graders with just-passing reading scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). “We were seeing a significant drop-off in reading scores between the fifth and sixth grades,” says Cruz, “so I decided to ask students why. There was a distinct pattern to their responses. They didn’t like reading novels. They couldn’t identify with the characters. They didn’t like doing worksheets. But it wasn’t that they didn’t like to read. They liked to read online, non-fiction subject matter that pertained to them, to their interests.” Cruz recognized that unless they reached these at-risk students in a way that would hold their attention, their test grades would most likely continue to fall each subsequent year. “This gave me the idea to integrate reading strategies and technology productivity —building skills, not playing games!” 10 In the BLASTT classroom, students develop their reading, writing, research, presentation and technical skills while working on projects in a variety of core subject areas. However, instead of utilizing lectures, textbooks and worksheets, the curriculum incorporates word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, databases and laptop computers wirelessly connected to the Internet. On any given day—such as January 22 in Westridge Middle Schools’ BLASTT literacy class, for instance, one of three current BLASTT classes offered by OCPS—the students might be learning about contemporary Japanese culture and tasked with comparing their Japanese peers’ lifestyle to their own. The day’s assignment was announced and while the laptops were distributed, there was the expected chatter. Then came the sound of dozens of laptops booting up, and moments later, a surprising hush filled the room as every child’s face grew intent upon the media-rich content on their screens. Brows knit and eyes narrowed in concentration, the students were soon scribbling notes on what they were learning. No more bottleneck It’s a scene—a classroom of students absorbing new ideas from the other side of the globe via the Internet—for which Perreault, Cruz and others have been waiting for a very long time. “The network we used to have, there was a bottleneck at the door of the school,” explains Perreault. “Even if we had a very robust network inside the school, once it hit the door, the connection from it to downtown and out to the Internet was a very, very small pipe.” Before ENA’s implementation, the bandwidth leaving the district out to the Internet was about 150 megabits. Today it is 950 megabits, nearly six and half times greater. Mendez, the director of Infrastructure, is both pleased and impressed. “We are pleased with the service and the speeds, and we have seen an increase in traffic that has exceeded our immediate expectation. Already we are benefiting from better response times and the manageability of the network. We have heard from staff that the speed and response times have been excellent. Plus, some very important recent classroommanagement projects—such as the implementation of SMS (Chancery Student Management Solutions, a student information system software) and ProgressBook (a Web-based grade book application)—would not have been successful without the ENA managed network.” “Last year,” Perreault expands, “if we had all tried to go to the same sites or used Web-based reading software that we have available, it would not have been possible because we just didn’t have the amount of bandwidth for that many simultaneous users to get out the Internet and get back. It was too frustrating for the kids to use any of these resources.” Cruz agrees. “Before the new connectivity at Westridge, we always had dropped pages and pages that loaded slowly. If every student was hitting the same page, forget it, we would sit there for minutes at a time and the frustration factor definitely set in.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Get Connected - April 2008

The End of a Bottleneck: OCPS’ New Network Contents A Letter From the President Not Your Average Library: New Carlisle, IN New Consortium Program Launches May 1 Hands-on Education Education Leaders Decry EETT Cuts Much More Than E-mail: Gaggle’s Other Apps Notes From the CTO

Get Connected - April 2008

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