January 2006 — Features
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Beyond Borders
- Expand and enhance the scope of global exploration and communication among primary and secondary school students in Japan and the United States.
- Encourage increased interaction with and understanding of the natural environment among students in the United States and Japan.
- Create opportunities to utilize technology in education, so as to encourage online information exchanges between Japanese and American schools.
- Increase the understanding of different educational methods by having US and Japanese teachers meet and work together in each other's schools.
Several Callisburg ISD representatives—teachers, campus administrators, and the district technology director—were paired with their counterparts from an elementary, middle, and high school in Kesennuma, Japan. To qualify, the American teachers had to first participate in a teacher preparatory program. They also used videoconferencing to take six weeks of Japanese language lessons from a Japanese teacher in Tokyo before visiting Japan last summer in anticipation of the launch of the international student program in August.
Once the educator teams were in place, US and Japanese students began working together on the subject at hand: shared environmental issues impacting the Elm Fork of the Trinity River in Texas and the Omose River in Japan. Not by coincidence, both rivers are affected by agricultural runoff, industry, automobiles, processing plants, and other human activity. Students in each of the communities conduct age-appropriate studies to determine the quality of water upstream, contamination sources, and so on, then discuss their findings during monthly videoconferences. The results of their research are posted as blogs on a Web site specifically created for their collaboration, and are enriched with interactive information courtesy of digital cameras, electronic microscopes, e-mail, and wireless laptops.
Cost Considerations
Of course, technology projects of this kind require careful budgeting. But there's no need for districts with tight wallets to panic. Much like the traditional PC sector—where prices fall as sales volumes increase—prices for digital cameras, wireless laptops, and collaborative software continue to decline steadily.
The average price for a notebook computer fell below $1,100 in October 2005, down from $1,422 in October 2004, according to NPD Group (www.npd.com), a market research firm in Port Washington, NY. But even as prices drop, notebooks—including those used by students—continue to gain more and more capabilities.
In early 2006, most PC vendors will begin selling notebooks with dual-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD; www.amd.com) or Intel Corp. (www.intel.com). The dual-core design calls for two processor 'brains' on a single chip, and typically improves system performance by 60 percent to 70 percent, according to preliminary test results from AMD and Intel. Students and teachers should expect dual-core systems to vastly improve the performance of data-intensive applications, such as videoconferencing and voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone calls.
