Technology Counts - March 14, 2013 - 22

LIVING LABORATORY:

Lady Bird Johnson
Middle School in
Irving, Texas, houses
wind turbines and
solar panels, among
other features.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20

emphasizes science, math, and environmental education.
Students engage in project-based
learning using the school’s facilities. For instance, they collect and
use data from the school’s energyconservation and -production features to compare energy resources
at the school with the use of fossil
fuels. Students from around the
district visit Lady Bird Johnson
Middle School to learn how wind
turbines and solar panels produce
energy, and how such technologies
are designed.
“The school is actually what we
call a living laboratory,” says Scott
Layne, the assistant superintendent of school support services for
the Irving district. “The days of a
teacher standing in front of a class
and lecturing doesn’t work anymore at the K-12 level. It’s got to
be interactive.”
The school was financed through
a bond referendum that was
passed in 2007 and included $290
million for new construction and
renovations across the 34,000-student district. Although the school
cost about 10 percent more to build
than the average school building,
it received about $1 million in rebates in its first year of operation
from the electric company because
of the efficiencies it had put in
place, says Layne.
The median cost of a new high
school building completed in 2011
is $39 million, according to the 2012
Annual School Construction Report.
Beyond the learning modules
within the building focused on energy, the school is primarily wireless,
with one hard-wire connection in
each room to comply with testing requirements, he says, and each classroom also features an interactive
whiteboard and digital projector.
Beyond those features, most
of the one-person student desks
have been replaced with tables
for groups of four to six students
to work together, says Layne. And
students have access to iPads,
netbooks, and laptops that move
around the school on carts.
“Allowing students to use different devices for different types of
classes helps to pique their interest,” Layne says.
Unlike high schoolers in the Irving district—who each receive a
laptop computer to take home—
the middle schoolers are required
to leave the devices at school overnight, where they are placed in the
carts and recharged.
Because of the access students
have to technology, Lady Bird
Johnson Middle School is moving
toward a paperless model, says
Layne, with students turning in
homework online, and teachers
22

EDUCATION WEEK

Photos by_Brandon Thibodeaux for Education Week
grading their work and sending it
back through the network.
Similarly, the Gateway Community Charters network—a nonprofit, Sacramento, Calif.-based
group of charter schools—plans to
allow students to learn from the
school building now being designed
for students in grades K-8, says
Michael Gillespie, the network’s
assistant superintendent.
For instance, the school, which
will focus on the stem subjects—
science, technology, engineering,
and math—will have exposed
beams in the ceiling to demonstrate engineering techniques.
It will also feature classrooms
with large roll-up doors that can be
opened when more space is needed,
as well as built-in spaces for carts
of laptops in each classroom.
For now, the architects are planning details such as where the
interactive whiteboards will be located and how many electrical outlets will be in each classroom, says
Gillespie. Plans are to be drawn in
the coming months, with groundbreaking expected in the summer
of 2014, he says.

COLLEGE AND CAREERS
At the 1,800-student East Ridge
High School outside Minneapolis,
which opened in 2009, students
are getting the 21st-century learning experience that school officials
envisioned when the building was
designed.
The school is broken up into six
smaller learning communities
made up of nine classrooms each,
with breakaway spaces called
learning-resource centers for student and teacher collaboration. It
also features a “main street” design
that links all six learning communities to encourage school unity.
“Technology is one of the ... core
areas that we really strive to embed
in all we do,” says Aaron Harper, the

>> MARCH 14, 2013

INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCES:

The school offers facilities,
such as a solar panel
observation deck, for
students to engage in
project-based learning.

principal of the school, which is part
of the 17,300-student South Washington County school district.
Each classroom at East Ridge
High is equipped with an interactive
whiteboard, projector, and studentresponse system, and—as at Lady
Bird Johnson Middle School—rolling carts of devices such as laptops,
netbooks, and iPads rotate throughout the school.
In addition, the school allows students to bring in their own devices
to connect to the wireless network.
“We come at it more from a college-campus view,” Harper says of
the flexibility allowed students in
tapping technology.
The science and engineering
equipment available at the school
has paved the way for East Ridge to
be one of the first high schools in the
country certified to teach engineering and biomedical sciences, says
Harper. “Those experiences have
just been invaluable in terms of advancing [student] learning,” he says.
Harper was brought on during the
planning and development phase of
the construction and was able to
talk with the architects and designers about his vision for the school.
Starting from scratch with a new
school allowed his teachers to re-

think the way they used technology,
he says, but it has still been a challenge to bring all the teachers sufficiently up to speed to adopt and
integrate the technology into their
classrooms.
This school year, East Ridge High
has moved to a blended model for
some of its classes, allowing students to come into the building two
or three days a week while they
complete the rest of the courses at
home through the Internet.
Blended learning may not be
right for every student, says
Harper, but for certain students, it
could be an option worth exploring.
He hopes to expand the blended
courses to include 20 to 30 different
courses within the next few years.

MOBILE MOVES
Although both East Ridge High
School and Lady Bird Johnson
Middle School use interactive
whiteboards, Irene Nigaglioni, a
partner at pbk, an architecture
and engineering consulting firm,
says that some schools are moving
away from such fixed technology
in favor of more mobile solutions.
For example, new technology is-

being developed to turn iPads or
iPhones into projectors, she says.
Some schools are also buying
large flat-screen TVs instead of
whiteboards as prices come down
enough to make such purchases
feasible for schools, she says.
Choosing the technology should
always be the last step when building a new school, advises Nigaglioni, because of how quickly it
can change, and keeping the space
flexible is critical to being able to
accommodate those changes.
Victoria Bergsagel, the founder
and director of Architects of
Achievement, a Mercer Island,
Wash.-based education design
consulting firm, says that when it
comes to the design of school buildings, K-12 leaders have been slow
to innovate.
“Unfortunately, if Rip Van Winkle
were to wake up today, he’d probably still recognize our schools,” she
says. “We went from the industrial
age to the information age, and
we’re kind of going into the innovation age, but if you look at our
schools, they still look like that factory model with cells and bells, especially in the upper grades.”
But some schools are setting out
to break the mold, she says, and

Technology Counts - March 14, 2013

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