New Jersey’s Pascack Valley Regional High School District let visitors peek into the inner workings of its successful eLearning initiative through a webinar hosted by the New Jersey School Boards Association and NSBA on May 11.
Pascack Valley, located in the northeast corner of the New Jersey and home to corporations like BMW, Sony, and A&P, was the first of three 2011 Education Technology Site Visits that NSBA’s Technology Leadership Network presented. Other events included visits to Newport News (Va.) Public Schools in April and Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Ky. this week.
“The site visits have been part of NSBA’s commitment to educational technology since the late 1980s. They provide a great hands-on opportunity to see, hear and talk with educators who are engaged in using technology in transformative ways,” said Ann Flynn, NSBA’s director of education technology.
Flynn said with about one-third of school districts across the country embarking on a 1-to-1 learning initiative, hearing from one of the districts who have launched such an endeavor was a reason Pascack Valley, which began its laptop project more than seven years ago, was selected.
“I remember when you started this [project], the newspapers, everybody thought you were all crazy, nobody could imagine it,” said Erik Endress, NJSBA’s director of association and business development.
For some time Pascack Valley had been interested in integrating technology in more effective ways in classroom, said Erik Gundersen, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction and assessment. And while the demand for more technology was there among teachers and students, the lack of hardware and infrastructure prevented them from moving forward.
So district officials decided to visit Virginia’s Henrico County Public Schools, which in 2001 became the largest school district in the country to implement a 1:1 initiative without a major influx of funds. On the way back, the busload of community members, board members, district staff and parents had a lot of time to talk and eventually come together behind this huge undertaking.
“We had to have district leadership in place and the board played a key role because when you have those questions in the supermarket line you can answer those,” said Erich Tusch, Pascack Valley’s supervisor of technology. “Then there’s technology leadership and of course, financial leadership is critical because that person needs to know what is needed in classroom so they can build a budget based on those needs.”
One of the most important things the district did before unrolling the laptop initiative was move from purchasing the hardware to leasing it.
“That way the inventory remains fresh and it becomes a fixed cost and effective way of managing it,” Tusch said. “The hardware was less important to us than instructional piece.”
That’s really the bottom line, said Gundersen.
“Professional development ended up being a huge cost factor and fortunately leadership understood this,” he said. “And professional development isn’t focused on the laptop but continuous curriculum change and engaging the student on a greater level.”
For instance, Web 2.0 technologies have allowed students taking Italian to converse with students in Italy. Meanwhile peer editing thanks to blogging software is a focal point in all of the district’s English classes, and primary source documents gathered online enrich their social studies courses.
For board members intrigued and enticed by what a 1:1 eLearning initiative can offer, there is a lot of data to draw from to make a compelling pitch to the superintendent, Gundersen said.
“But you can’t go ahead and try to convince people that this will improve test scores, that’s not what this is about,” said Gundersen. “It’s about engaging students and creating authentic experiences for them.”
Watch the archived webinar here.
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