ROI Report

SOMETIMES WIRELESS MOBILITY IS more than a convenience in the classroom — it’s a requirement for effective teaching.

After researching best practices in literacy education, Addison School District 4 in Addison, Ill., adopted a new emphasis on small-group instruction. Teachers and students alike had to be able to move around freely to accommodate the ad hoc groups.

However, the public school district’s main tools for viewing videos and other types of multimedia were VCRs and TVs — technologies that were cumbersome and hard to move. Also, the TVs didn’t work well for Web pages because the text displayed was too small for most students to read.

“People got tired of the limitations,” says Mary Mehl, a veteran teacher in the district. “A lot of teachers were using it for nothing but videos.”

In a pilot program conducted during the last school year, Mehl and 19 other teachers tested various networked wireless projectors and tablet PCs in their classes. This fall, the district will deploy these technologies in all classrooms in the district’s junior high school, six elementary schools and kindergarten/ preschool center.

The pilot plan was that teachers would walk around the classroom carrying their tablet PC and use the projector to display whatever was on their screen. During lessons, students could borrow the teachers’ tablets as needed.

Last year’s pilot didn’t always go smoothly. However, through trial and error, the teachers, IT staff and administrators ended up gaining insight into what to look for in these types of wireless devices and how best to incorporate them into instruction. Ultimately, they found a solution that was well-suited to their needs.

LEARNING FROM MISTAKES

In fall 2004, the district’s Educational Development Committee established its criteria for the new technologies before deciding which ones to pilot. Jim Frontier, director of curriculum and instruction, says the committee’s requirements included a tablet with Internet connectivity and preferably a CD/DVD drive. It also included a wireless projector that can be used in a fully lit room, can be projected both on a screen and on surfaces such as dry-erase boards, and can be moved easily for better visibility.

The district’s first combination of tablets and projectors did not meet its needs for wireless mobility, recalls Tecia Williams, information technology manager. To her knowledge, no one was able to get the tablets and projectors to communicate with each other wirelessly, so the pilot teachers ended up hardwiring them together, she says.

Making matters worse, the projectors only sporadically stayed connected to the district’s Wi-Fi a/b/g network. The problem could have been caused by a configuration problem with the wireless card, which was purchased separately, Williams says. The tech staff’s unfamiliarity with such devices also could have been a factor, rather than defects in the products, she acknowledges. In any case, the connectivity problems defeated the purpose of the pilot, so the district looked for a new combination.

The school district selected Epson’s PowerLite 765C projectors and Lenovo ThinkPad X41 tablets. Unlike the previous projector-tablet combination, it was simple to get the ThinkPad tablets and Epson projectors communicating, Williams says. In fact, it’s so easy to show the teachers how to set up the devices to work together that it requires only “verbal training that takes all of 10 minutes,” she adds.

The new technologies are a better match for the district in other ways, too. Since the projectors are more than 2 pounds lighter than the previous ones, they are more portable for teachers who move from school to school.

The ThinkPads were considerably less expensive than the previous tablets, Williams says. They also offered some convenient features the pilot teachers requested, including built-in keyboards and CD/DVD drives in their docking stations, says Terri Bresnahan, education and information technology director.

CREATIVE USES

Clearly, technologies are more than the sum of their technical specs: It’s what you do with them that counts. Teachers in the pilot used the flexibility and interactivity of their new multimedia technologies for myriad uses in small-group and whole-group instruction, from showing streaming videos, to letting students use the tablet to circle the correct answer to math problems, to using Microsoft Windows Journal to annotate Word documents during grammar lessons.

One teacher, Sam Berrios, used the technologies in an enterprising way with his first-grade bilingual class. He took pictures of each page of a story and assembled them into a PowerPoint presentation. “Students could read from the screen,” he says. “We could emphasize the sounds we were practicing for the week and the vocabulary for the particular story.”

The large projection afforded better visibility than the book itself. The Windows XP tablet offered the interactivity of being able to mark up the text during the lesson, using a stylus. “I could use the ink feature for PowerPoint to emphasize words, underline and highlight,” Berrios explains. “Students could do the same thing, coming to the tablet and doing it themselves.”

TAKING MEASURE

Because the combination was successful in the pilot, the district purchased 168 Epson projectors (one for every classroom this fall) and 298 ThinkPads (218 for teachers and 80 to go on mobile carts for student use in the upcoming school year). So far, the district has spent about $842,000 for the technologies, as well as software, operating systems, speakers, utility carts and other supplies, Williams says.

At this early stage of the project, the ROI has been mixed, Williams says. “There are so few people who have used it, and they’re just learning how to use it,” she points out. However, since Williams’ IT staff and the technology vendors provided training during the summer, all the teachers should be up to speed this fall. In addition, Bresnahan and others will conduct year-long staff-development training on incorporating the recent technologies into instruction.

While teachers are enjoying the new possibilities, the students benefit the most, says Mehl, who used her projector and tablet during at least 40 percent of her instruction in her special-ed preschool class last year. Her students “love to interact with the computer,” she says. “They love to be the one going up there and using the mouse and making the choices. They feel so empowered by it.”

Those early steps toward digital literacy are especially significant in a district where around a third of students are from low-income households. “Right now, maybe only 50 percent of kids in Addison have access to computers,” Mehl says. “I know a lot of our lower-income families have not purchased them, or if they have, they may not have Internet access. In a community like ours, it would be problematic if we were not able to put these [tablet PCs] in the hands of our children.”