May 2001 — Applications
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East Harlem’s Winning School Technology Formula
Now that sufficient technology has been acquired, the district plans on expanding its portfolio of collaborative, thematic projects. In addition to Project Justice and the Endangered Species Project, others have been added as the natural curiosity of students and their teachers has taken them in new directions. At a share fair hosted by the school system’s Office of Instructional Technology this past spring, a dozen other school districts signed on as partners in the projects.
I suspect that as the district continues to develop content and deepen its unique relationships with the instructional technology business community, eventually a remarkable reversal of roles will evolve. Instead of being purely a consumer, as has always been the case, the school district will begin to market its programs to a world that is hungry for them.
Mark Gura
Director, Office of Instructional Technology
New York City Board of Education
Mark_L._Gura@fc1.nycenet.edu
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Tech-Hungry Students, Generous Corporate Partners, Central Support and the Determination to SucceedX@XCloseTag000
Ten years ago, when I taught in East Harlem, there was hardly a computer to be found anywhere in my school. True, the issue was being addressed, as it was in New York City’s other 31 community school districts, but in a way that would probably offer too little too late to make much of a difference to youngsters living in a world growing more dependent on technology every day. Now, however, all of this changed. East Harlem has since evolved a unique Instructional Technology program that could serve as a model for the rest of the city.
In 1997, the Board of Education started Project Smart Schools, a program that would begin reversing the problem of insufficient computers available to teachers and students. It would also address the inequity of computer access among the many different populations of students in the city. Surmounting a host of logistical problems, the program placed clusters of four state-of-the-art personal computers, networked simply to a printer, in the vast majority of the system’s many thousands of middle school subject-classrooms. School libraries also received computers, as well as Internet access. This infusion of hardware was exactly the “shot in the arm” East Harlem needed to take its technology program to the next level.
Even more significant, however, was the handful of full-time staff developer positions that came with the computers. Community school districts were directed to hire staff from among their own ranks, sharing their knowledge of local culture and relationships with members of the learning community. The cadre of professionals that East Harlem recruited would visit the district’s schools, encouraging the use of computers as support for the teaching of Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies and other subjects.
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Developing an Effective Program
X@XCloseTag001Over the next couple of years, the Project Smart Schools group was busy making discoveries. Despite some spotty experimentation with computers throughout the city prior to the project, a comprehensive program to make computers an integral part of the everyday work of subject classrooms had never been tried before.
