No one likes waiting for audio and video files to download. Certainly not school teachers, who can't afford to waste precious classroom time while students stare at a half-blank computer screen, waiting for a virtual museum tour to finish loading.
But if all goes as planned, K-12 students in California may soon have access to an array of rich content previously unavailable to them due to the limitations of slow bandwidth.
The Digital California Project provides $3.6 million a year for a broadband network to wire all of the state's 11,000 K-12 schools. Funded by the state of California, the project is scheduled to be completed by June 2002.
The DCP will work in conjunction with programs being developed by The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, a nonprofit organization that helps educational institutions acquire high-capacity Internet communications services.
The DCP is being implemented by making more robust two existing university networks -- The University of California network and 4CNet, California's community college network.
"We extended the K-12 schools into the already existing network, so basically what the governor did was save himself a billion dollars," Vaille said.
California is not the first state to network all of its K-12 schools. Classrooms in Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington are also wired. In 1994, Missouri was the first state to network all of its K-12 schools, and since then the system has had numerous upgrades.
Missouri's MOREnet (Missouri Research and Education Network) is similar to California's project in that it is state funded, but each school must pay a yearly fee for access. Ranging from $600 to $3,000 per year, the fee is determined by the size of the school.
Although broadband access in all K-12 schools is important, it is vital to educate teachers and administrators about the advantages of rich content in teaching, said Bill Mitchell, executive director of MOREnet. He said Missouri has employed certified technology teachers to help educators learn more about technology and its applications in the classroom.
"I started out very much a beginner," said Jill Rice, a fourth grade teacher from Richardson Elementary School in Lee's Summit, Missouri. "Last year I had 75 hours of training."
After witnessing how students benefited from multimedia learning, Mitchell helped start a program called eMINTS (enhancing Missouri's Instructional Networked Teaching Strategies) which provides Missouri's K-12 schools with tech equipment for classroom instruction.
Classrooms in the eMINTS program include high-speed Internet access, a computer for every two students, teaching software, multimedia teaching workstation, videoconferencing equipment, a digital camera, scanner and printer.
School districts selected to participate in the program choose elementary classrooms that are then monitored closely so school decision-makers can better understand the benefits of teaching technology.
But not all of Missouri's K-12 classrooms are funded by eMINTS.
When Rice's students leave her classroom to enter the fifth grade, they go from an enriched technology environment to computer lab visits twice a week. Rice said her former students are jolted by the change, so she and her colleagues are trying to find more equipment and raise additional foundation money.
"I loved teaching before, but when I lie awake at night thinking about this program, it's exciting," Rice said. "You know you've got kids when you can't get them to go to recess."
