There was nothing necessarily remarkable about junior high schoolstudents reuniting with old friends last week to talk about theirsummer vacations and the new school year. Except these students werenearly 3,000 miles apart.
Students at Washington's SEED Public Charter School werecommunicating with students at Sequoia Junior High School nearSeattle. The two schools are participants in "Washington2Washington,"an educational program linking the two schools that was started lastyear by Microsoft Corp.
Through the program, Microsoft and Dell Computer Corp. outfittedtwo classrooms, one in each school, with desktop computers andsoftware and provided extra equipment such as digital cameras,laptops for teachers and scientific tools. Using the computers, teamsmade up of students from both schools work on projects that combinelessons from traditional science and civics classes into a year-longcollaborative project.
The students participate in a curriculum developed by Paul Neef, ascience teacher at Sequoia, and Brandon Lloyd, a civics teacher atthe SEED (Schools for Educational Evolution and Development) school,in Southeast Washington. The two teachers met before the programbegan last year and developed a lesson plan based on the idea ofbuilding an imaginary country from scratch. The students in theDistrict would focus primarily on issues of governance and politics,while the students in Seattle would cover scientific andenvironmental issues. Working in teams over the Internet usingpresentation software, online-meeting tools, e-mail and Web-publishing programs, the students would build an entire country,complete with cities, national symbols and wildlife.
By grouping students in teams, the organizers sought to emphasizecollaborative techniques used by businesses with employees indifferent locations, according to John Litton, Microsoft's directorof youth and learning. It also made each student rely on theperformance of other students for their total grade. Grades wereposted for all of the teams to see, with special privileges given toteams that performed the best, fostering intense competition amongstudent groups.
The students always wanted to know how they could catch up withthe other students, Lloyd said. "They have kids mad at them fromthousands of miles away," he said.
That connection to students in a distant city was one of the mostvaluable parts of the program for Lloyd. All of his students are fromthe District and many have disadvantaged backgrounds, a far cry fromthe suburban setting of the Sequoia school in a Seattle suburb.Lloyd's students, he said, often believed that 60 percent of theUnited States is African American. By communicating with studentsfrom different backgrounds in a different city, their perceptions ofthe wider world changed.
"The students' whole idea of what the world is was expanded," hesaid.
Microsoft continues to back the program, Litton said, and has putup $180,000 in cash to help subsidize field trips and year-end visitsby students to the District and Seattle. The company also hopes tohelp Lloyd and Neef develop a teaching manual based on the class'scurriculum so the program can be duplicated at other schools.
"There's nothing special about this technology," Litton said. "Wenow want them to take what they're learning and share it with otherteachers, as well."
One of the first hurdles for teachers overseeing the program wasbringing students up to speed with the technology. Their experiencewith computers varied widely.
"There was everything from kids that know more than I do tostudents that rarely, if ever, touch a computer," Neef said.
Some of the students, Lloyd said, "didn't know what I meant when Isaid 'double-click.' "
But by teaming experienced students with inexperienced ones, Lloydsaid, everyone was brought up to speed early in the school year.Their proficiency was on display last week when students whoparticipated in the program's first year were back in Lloyd'sclassroom to chat with some of their friends in Seattle. Two eighth-graders, Antwain Coward and Adam Delosreyes, both 13, showed offtheir completed projects from last year, demonstrating an impressivecommand of the business software installed on their computers.
"Control Z, man," said Adam after Antwain mistyped, identifyingthe universal keystroke for 'undo' that even some experienced adultcomputer users might not know.
An attempt was made to connect to the Seattle classroom usingvideo-teleconferencing software, but the students were thwarted bytechnical difficulties.
"It looks like we'll talk the old-fashioned way," said Adam, whichmeant nothing as arcane as a telephone or a letter but rather areturn to instant messaging.
More stories in SOFTWARE/SERVICES online at Washtech.com.
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