May 2001 — Applications
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
East Harlem’s Winning School Technology Formula
Tech-Hungry Students, Generous Corporate Partners, Central Support and the Determination to Succeed
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.
Developing an Effective Program
Over 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. There was so much to be done. Teachers were intrigued and fearful about using the computers that now sat in their classrooms. They needed to learn basic tech skills and how to use the computers to teach their lessons; new computer-supported curriculum had to be written; radical new approaches to classroom management had to be developed; and on and on.
After a whirlwind period of hard work at stirring up change in the district’s classrooms, technology coordinator John Ferro and fellow staff developers Ben Sender, Richard Carlton, Yolanda Rivera Hernandez, and Susannah Moran stopped to evaluate their progress. Many teachers had begun to adopt the computers as an instructional resource, and many others were willing to experiment with them from time to time. A large body of curriculum, software alignments, and instructional practice had been developed. Students had produced much wonderful work. Still, despite what looked like significant achievement and success, the staff developers had to concede that running though all of it was a struggle.
