For Thursday, February 24, 2000 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 708 words

Another milestone

I love the smell of silicon in the springtime.

As of today, every teacher at Benicia High School has a classroom computer with a Zip Drive, a TV connection and a network card to connect to the Internet. We are becoming a digital high school.

Teachers and students can now use their classroom computers to give televised presentations. Public speeches can be accompanied by rolling text, film clips, and illustration.

My classes have embarked on our second annual PowerPoint Presentation Project. We are into week three. Each student is creating an advanced digital slide show up in the computer lab to share with their classmates down in the auditorium. This is my big technology integration unit.

We integrate the Internet, PowerPoint, scanner, digital camera, microphone, CD, sound effects, video capture, and personal creativity into a multimedia work of art, literature, and science that will last forever, provided our great, great grandchildren's software is backwards compatible.

Last year the topic was atrocities -- man's inhumanity to man. It came on the heels of our Holocaust Remembrance reading of Night by Elie Wiesel. The project lasted six weeks and produced some of the most powerfully pointed presentations I've yet to see. They are collected on a CD in case the students who made them ever want a copy.

One major atrocity from last year was how long it took to finish the project. It was supposed to last four weeks. It took six, once we factored in all the technical glitches. This year I hope to learn from those mistakes finish this project in less time.

My students' goal is to make outstanding presentations. My goal is to make the process as smooth as possible.

Our biggest obstacle last year was file transportation -- moving the swelling 5 and 10 megabyte presentation files between computers. Files were always getting damaged and refusing to open. Students who wanted to work at home used a PowerPoint option called Pack and Go that allows users to span large files across multiple floppy disks. Students would pack their presentation across a half-dozen floppies, take them home to work on them, and bring back an updated file the next day.

Imagine how many times I saw this message: "Error reading Drive A:" Another project on the skids for another day.

This year I have help. Our technology has improved. Our auditorium computer is networked to our lab computers. We can just beam the presentations down without diskettes. Soon our campus network will be complete and we will be able to beam student projects to any classroom any time and show them on the TV.

This year more students' families own not only PowerPoint but also own a Zip Drive. Zip disks hold 100 megabytes -- the rough equivalent of 70 floppy disks -- and are useful tools for any student. Huge files are a breeze to transport with a Zip Drive. Having a Zip Drive at home makes things easier for everyone. Every kid should have one. I say, I say every kid should have one.

Students without Zip Drives at home will be shown alternatives to transporting huge files on diskette. We can upload them to the Internet from school and download them from home, or create many small presentations and copy/paste them together.

This year the presentations will not deal with atrocities. The new topic is more cheerful. Each student will spotlight a favorite author and create a three-part presentation: a biography, a summary of the author's works, and a personal reaction. Their technical goal will be to use all the advanced features of PowerPoint, push it to its limits -- sound, animation, video, the works. My goal is to make all this possible.

That is my lesson plan. As the technology mentor, what I have learned by experience I can share with my peers before they begin.

With the extra time saved, I hope to show my students how to make web pages. Designing a personal web page has gone from frill to necessary skill. We will create personal portals, learn about web-hosting, ftp, and html -- the basics.

Then we will read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and write a comparison contrast essay. We won't need computers for that.