DOVER — Dover Elementary School students have 36 new laptops and printers to use at school and at home, thanks to a project that aims to increase digital literacy within rural communities and encourage broadband use.
“This is the world they're growing up in, and the most responsible thing we can do is to prepare them,” said Eric Bird, lead trainer for the Dover Elementary project.
Bird works with Digital Wish, in Manchester Center, which has given the school computers for students in grades 4 through 6.
Netbooks are lightweight, compact laptops designed primarily for working online.
The nonprofit is working with the e-Vermont: The Community Broadband Project, which is run by the Montpelier-based Vermont Council on Rural Development.
“The trajectory of a project like e-Vermont represents a very long arc,” said Dover Economic Development Specialist Patrick Moreland.
“I think the argument goes; if we train people on how to use the Internet first, when the service becomes available more customers will choose to sign up, hopefully leading Internet service providers to want to invest in more infrastructure,” he said.
According to Moreland, the Dover Selectboard has prioritized obtaining town-wide broadband Internet infrastructure.
In the classroom
Dover Elementary Principal William Anton said between the new laptop computers and Dover Elementary's existing 23 laptops, the school can provide machines for all 54 students in grades 2 through 6.
The students will use the computers in the classroom and take them home to complete assignments, he said.
Anton and Moreland applied for the Digital Wish grant earlier last winter. The school received news of the award in January.
Anton credits the professionalism and curiosity of the teachers at Dover Elementary for the project's current success. He said the teachers have embraced the new technology and found ways to integrate the laptops into their curriculum.
According to Anton, the computers and new access to online tools like Discovery Education have allowed educators to tailor assignments to students' learning levels and interests.
The site from the subsidiary of Discovery Communications, LLC, which also owns The Discovery Channel provides a repository of education resources such as lesson plans.
If students are studying South America, the teacher can easily customize assignments, offering one version especially for a student who loves music and another for one who loves animals, Anton said.
Teachers have also assigned digital journals to test the students' topic comprehension, said Anton.
A teacher presenting a financial literacy class has told Anton that using the Digital Wish computers has made his 45-minutes class period more efficient. Students have immediate access to resources like spreadsheets, said the teacher.
Modernizing the classroom
Bird said that Digital Wish, founded in 2006 by Heather Chirtea, links teachers with technology needs to donors.
Teachers nationwide can post digital wish lists on the website. Donors from big to small, called sponsors, provide the funds for the items on the teachers' lists. Digital Wish also works with companies to obtain technology at discounted prices.
Digital Wish also helps train teachers to incorporate technology into their classrooms.
Bird said Digital Wish launched a classroom modernization initiative prior to joining e-Vermont. The nonprofit, said Bird, saw the need to help Vermont schools bring their technology, equipment and curriculum, into the 21st Century.
Working with e-Vermont, Digital Wish has provided 24 schools with netbooks, software, and trainings, said Bird.
Each school, he said, stands at a different stage with technology so Digital Wish tailors its trainings and its software packages to each institution.
“You can't just dump technology in a classroom [and leave], because you'll have much less success,” he said.
Dell and Microsoft helped provide the equipment and software packages for the e-Vermont project, said Bird.
Although he couldn't speak to the direct amount Dell, Microsoft, and Digital Wish agreed upon, Bird said if an individual wanted to buy the netbook, a full Microsoft Office Pro 2010 software package, and printer, it would cost between $1,200 to $1,300 per package.
The educational community at Dover Elementary is “driven to really use this technology,” said Bird.
He noted that the teachers and administration at the school were already using some technology and programs in their curriculum, but were ready to dig deeper.
Bird also has parents' nights planned to help connect the adults to what their children are doing in the classroom.
“Every community has something,” said Bird.
Bird hopes Dover Elementary is the starting point for an “organic process” that ripples out to neighboring communities.
Saying that “Vermont is a great place to live,” he said if Vermont could have impart its population with strong digital skills, the state will attract good technology jobs that will allow its future work force to stay in its home state.
Positive results
According to Anton, the program's positive impacts range from giving students typing practice to teaching them to better vet Internet-based information.
And being discriminating information consumers is a necessary skill for his students, said Anton.
Information will bombard students every time they go online, said Anton. The more years and training that students devote to synthesizing information, the more fluent they will become in using it in their assignments and everyday lives.
The technology becomes a tool that keeps students involved with the curriculum, said Bird.
Bird listed problem-solving as a concrete skill for kids upping their digital skills. He joked that problem-solving becomes an essential skill for anyone faced with a computer that has decided not to operate properly.
A few hiccups in the plan, said Anton, include slow Internet access in portions of Dover.
Anton said Digital Wish understands that because many Dover students have only dial-up connections at home, the home assignments have been designed not to need the speed. Bird, said Anton, will also teach students tricks like cacheing web pages so they can view them at home directly from the computer's hard disk without going online.
Also, he said, some parents may need to elevate their own Internet or computer skills, so they can support their children at home.
The town of Dover will offer adult education computer literacy classes through the e-Vermont program over the summer.
Anton also foresees a challenge for schools receiving Dover students once they transition to seventh grade, because the students will want to attend programs that operate at the technology levels they'd become accustomed to.
After sixth grade, Dover tuitions its students to other schools. According to Anton, students can use their tuition money at any accredited, non-sectarian middle or high school in the world.
Trainings
The program will consist of two years of training for teachers by DigitalWish. In the spring, the nonprofit helped install equipment and began training teachers and students, said Anton. The program will ramp up this fall.
In the fall, Bird will teach a six-module curriculum, beginning with “Digital Citizenship,” which covers community mores that students of the digital age will need for the online portion of their lives, such as Internet safety, respect, and ethics around copyright and social media.
Kids will need to know how to discern the pop-up ads offering “free” iPods, said Bird. But they will also need to understand respect, responsibility, and safety - what Bird calls the “2 Rs and an S.”
In Bird's view, the current generation never received responsible training in how to act appropriately in cyberspace. That has led to painful issues like cyberbullying.
Right now, Internet ethics around things like behavior and copyright are still a “free-for-all,” Bird said. “It's the world they live in.”
But “the classroom is stepping up to their life,” said Bird.
“The value of communications technology for rural Vermont is unparalleled,” said Moreland. “Our quality of life is outstanding. When paired with the ability to communicate and conduct business, we finally develop a real competitive advantage.”