For Thursday, Sept 9, 1999 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 717 words
Same boat, brother
One word is all I need to hear to tell me that vacation is over. When I hear that word, I know there's plenty of work to be done. The word is technology. The place is Benicia High School. The job is to send us screaming and gleaming into the 21st century.
A wonderful thing is happening this year. It's happening in Benicia, and I induce that it's happening around the country: More members of the business community are coming to realize at a proactive level that our students will someday become their employees.
Sure, American business people have always known that employees come from public schools. For decades we've heard the jokes and lamentations over the sketchy skill levels of many graduates. However, with the advent of technology invading all businesses at all levels, the need for trained employees, and the lack of them, has recently encouraged more business owners to go beyond lamentation.
When I say proactive, I mean our school children are receiving actual, physical, tangible help from the adult business community. At least it's happening in Benicia.
The East Bay Community Foundation was set up recently by local businessmen who have grown tired of turning away young American adults fresh out of high school or college who come to apply for jobs with weak to no computer skills. The EBCF was created to manage local endowments designed to fund the integration of technology into all our classrooms. It was opened with a half-million dollars to ramp up the high school. Wahoo! Good morning, World.
With this huge, prize-winning, watermelon-sized seed money we will network all our rooms together and equip each one with a classroom computer hooked to the school's network and to the Internet. Zounds! These computers can then be linked into the classroom televisions for big-screen displays. Gadzooks! Our new network will allow teachers to enter grades and attendance directly into SASI, our records program. Shazam! No more scantrons. Can it be?
Each room will also have extra outlets for additional computers. We're thinking ahead.
I have been invited to help with the roll-out as part of my long-standing tech-guy status. My first step will be to form an open-invitation tech committee to help plot the course. I will also do classroom support and training, along with my friend, teacher Phil Greene, the school's web mentor guy.
Aren't you excited? Phil wants each teacher to have a web page with email to increase communications. Teachers could post their course descriptions, rules, assignments, and so on, for kids and parents alike. The page could be one simple text file updated once a year, or an elaborate web site with robots, sounds and animation updated daily.
Phil and I have class sites and we love them. They have set us free. As soon as teachers see how liberating it can be -- no more "reviewing of everything" with a new student, no more lining up at the copy machine to print out every handout of the year, fewer lectures, and fewer missed opportunities to allow absent or aggressive learners to work ahead -- they will want one. Mine can be found at go.to/n5 and it links to Phil's.
We want to provide a variety of workshops this year, something for everyone. Here are a few others we're planning: PowerPoint and the classroom TV; digital grading; dealing with Internet plagiarism; Internet as a research tool; Intro to Computers. It will be a busy, fruitful year.
I hope this relationship with business flourishes. I'm curious to know what the business community feels is most important to teach -- What skills? What software?
Now, I will close with an open invitation exclusively to the future employers of our public-school students: the EBCF's first endowment is funding the "100-percent Connected" project at the high school. There are many other projects. There are many other schools in the district that could use similar adoptions. These days, kids need tech support at an early age. Digitally unifying an entire school district is a colossal endeavor. I'm asking that you all consider contributing in your own way to helping our kids compete in a global employment marketplace. It's the same boat, brother.
Interested? Call me. Email me. Call Bob. Come by. Drop a line. Give a whistle. I'll be there.