November 2004 — Industry Perspective
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The Future of Anytime, Anywhere Education
Pitt County School District Uses Communication Technology to Improve Student Results
The District:
The Pitt County School District in Greenville, N.C., consists of 33 schools and more than 20,000 students in a 656-square-mile area in Eastern North Carolina. The district’s technology decisions are made by Rejeanor Scott, Pitt County’s director of media and technology.
The Challenges/Goals:
Improve the academic performance of at-risk students.
Place state-of-the-art tools in teachers’ hands to boost productivity and enhance the learning environment.
The Solution:
Pitt County deployed Sprint TekNet IP, which provides data, voice and video capabilities in every classroom. The system incorporates video distribution and control capabilities, IP phones and voice mail, as well as automated administrative functions. The district is also installing Sprint’s Empowered Education Desktop, which is powered by LearningStation and combines Sprint’s communications network with online delivery of a comprehensive listing of high-quality educational learning tools from a wide range of K-12 content providers. The Empowered Education Desktop provides the unique capability of tracking student application usage to support data-driven decision-making at both the school and district levels.
The Results:
A study of 60 students instructed in a technology-based environment outscored the general population in reading and math by more than 15%.
Teachers infused an array of multimedia content into the curriculum, allowing for a more interactive and visually stimulating learning environment.
Teachers are now more productive and effective with multimedia learning because they use an in-class digital phone and centralized media database instead of wheeled media carts with a TV and VCR.
The Comments:
Rejeanor Scott says: “The dropout rate is down. Kids are excited about learning. They’re engaged. … The role of teachers is changing. Students are now empowered, firsthand learners with the teacher as their educational guide.”
The Future:
Sprint hopes to help schools begin wirelessly enabling key technologies, multimedia tools and applications. The Sprint TekNet IP and Empowered Education Desktop are two examples of technology that could be expanded wirelessly to provide teachers, administrators and students with an anytime, anywhere multimedia experience. Sprint and other carriers are launching higher-speed wireless networks in the next year or so that are expected to accelerate mobile deployments in education. Specifically for Sprint, the company is upgrading to Evolution Data Optimized (EV-DO) technology that will have average user speeds of 300-500 kilobits per second and peak rates of up to 2.4 megabits per second. These speeds will greatly impact the multimedia content and education applications that students, teachers, faculty and family can access anytime, anywhere on the wireless network.
Resources:
To learn more about Sprint’s educational technology applications, visit www.sprint.com/education.
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