ElasTECHlearning

“The real hope for deep and enduring processes of evolution in schools lies with students. They have a deep passion for making schools work. They are connected to the future in ways that no adult is.” – Peter Senge

TILE stands for Technology Integrated Learning Environment.

The Space:
TILE classrooms are approximately twice the size of normal classrooms and have the ability to be split in two by a folding wall. TILEs should have enough laptops to allow two classrooms of students to work concurrently, as well as a smaller number of desktop computers. The furniture in the TILEs will allow for different configurations as it is mobile and of differing sizes & shapes. TILEs will have interactive technology deployments like touchscreen-whiteboards & iTouches. Because these are singular spaces in each of the buildings the district is committed to keeping them cutting edge.

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here? The focus isn’t on the technology alone, it also integrates any and all 21^st Century tools and teaching & learning concepts. A teacher may decide to use 30 laptops and an interactive whiteboard in the TILE, but for another teacher it might mean four laptops, a couple of cameras, some webspace, and room to spread out and work in groups.

Some ideas:
Technology should be transformative; laptops more than typewriters, interactive whiteboards are not movie screens. Technology allows us to do things we couldn’t do before. Consider these transformations:

• Instead of reading about globalization or mathematics or creative writing… use technology to talk with real world experts who ship jobs overseas, use math in construction or engineering, or writers & authors. Students can take this information and tell the story of connection. Publishing student work and celebrating is a very powerful motivator.
• Instead of always teaching language in our voice, use the student channels… take advantage of tools like IM and Chat, laptops, mobile devices, the places where students communicate with each other can also be the places where they learn.
• Instead of struggling with the scientific method…
  make everyone an expert. Keep the scientific method, but document it with pictures, movies, and interviews. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a video library of student science experiments where they explain and demonstrate their definitions, hypotheses, predictions, experiments, and conclusions?

Instead of you doing all the instruction…
Allow students to solve problems and share their solutions with the class, building, district… the world.

We are about two weeks into having a fully deployed fiber optic network across the district. Depending on who you are and what you do you should experience improvements that are obvious to ones that are subtle. I know that when we move data around the network we have sometimes shaved tens of minutes off the process. I know streaming content is more fluid. I know we can download large data files, like updates, in a reasonable time frame.

That’s not to say that the network is perfect – there is still work to be done. Things inside the district that might slow you down are:

• Old machines
• Old Airports (yes. Airports.)
• Bad wiring

We also have a bottleneck getting out (and back) from the Internet. We can now use our entire allotment of 13 Mbps down from the Illinois Century Network, that is still a pretty narrow pipe for 2000+ machines looking for access. (FYI – before our new AT&T fiber network was installed we had a grand total of 4.5 Mbps network access. Now we have 13 meg to the Internet & 100 Mbps in between buildings.)

All of these things we are working on, and some will show results earlier than others. The first four buildings to be rehabbed in the Master Planning Process for instance will be outfitted with new network cabling, wifi access, hard-wired ports & some new switches. Also, there are some options for us to increase from our existing 13 meg access, and as always we are looking for ways to upgrade machines.

Have you noticed a change for the better? What change do you still want to see?