New Course to the Future : Poway Schools On Cutting Edge of High-Tech Teaching

Mike Spalding has wrestled with designing an automobile on a computer to minimize fuel consumption without turning his hoped-for dragster into a tortoise.

Moises Salazar adds a personal touch to his computer-generated calendar with palm trees and hearts around the boxes for the days of the week.

Others among their seventh-grade peers smile as they successfully program a laser to transmit their voice over a light beam from one end of the gadget-filled classroom to the other.

These students at Bernardo Heights Middle School don’t know that their school district is on the cutting edge of a revolution in the way technology is being taught in public schools.

What they do know is that because of their Exploring Technology class, they are beginning to understand what makes the incredibly complex world around them tick.

And together with their teen-age counterparts in Applied Tech across the way at Rancho Bernardo High School, the students are learning why competence in math, science and particularly reading are vital requirements for succeeding in today’s electronically driven workplace.

Just as important, the new courses emphasize open-ended problem solving, less reliance on textbooks and more hands-on experiments, as well as student-to-student learning similar to the way employees must cooperate with each other in the business world.

Across the nation, school districts are shedding the shopworn images of traditional industrial arts, commonly known as vocational education, in a cascading move toward 21st-Century curricula.

“Wood shops just don’t cut it anymore,” said Sandra Johnson, who pushed for the new applied technology programs as principal of the newly opened Rancho Bernardo High. Already, her colleagues at Poway and Mt. Carmel high schools, as well as those at the Poway district’s four middle schools, also have begun similar high-tech in struction.

Even in the large and often unwieldy San Diego Unified School District, where industrial arts have languished for years, there are a couple of efforts under way, and administrators have secured money from the federal government and from software publishers to put programs into about half its secondary schools next year.

“We’ve been talking about this until we’re blue in the face,” said Neil Heimburge, who set up an Exploring Tech course this semester at Montgomery Middle School in Linda Vista.

Heimburge participates in an informal network of teachers along the Interstate 15 corridor from San Diego through Poway into Riverside County who exchange ideas on a monthly basis and provide mutual encouragement.

“Now that some programs are up and running, we’ve got teachers, principals and parents coming in to watch with a big question mark in their minds and walking out of here all fired up,” Heimburge said.

Up until now, the key to a successful program has been “a teacher willing to take all of this on,” said Rancho Bernardo High’s Johnson.

In her case, that was Bob Topolovac, a veteran shop teacher who three years ago--armed only with an antique computer and some reprints of pilot courses being tried in Colorado--began to dream about an applied technology course.

“At first, I didn’t have a clue about where to start,” said Topolovac, whose courses are becoming increasingly popular. “Now I don’t know where to stop.”

Basically, the courses are arranged in modules, or work stations, where two students at a time work on a technology such as electronic publishing, computer animation, or robotics. They get a brief introduction from a manual or videotape, and are then presented with a problem to solve or a project to tackle. Students rotate from module to module a week or two at a time, switching partners as they move.

“We’re applying the latest in computer and electronic techniques to real-world problems,” said Topolovac, who wrote much of the explanatory material and software himself because he found many of the manuals from equipment manufacturers were not user-friendly for students.

For example, in the computer-aided visualization module, students design kitchen cabinets, modify the dimensions of a living room and manipulate ceiling space as if an architect or designer creating an environment for a client.

In the communications module, they learn how to intercept fax signals from a shortwave radio and copy it into a machine.

“There’s so much more to be done, we’ve only scratched the surface,” Topolovac said of his 33 modules now available to students. “We need to make the curriculum better and get more career orientation into the projects, like tying robotics and hydraulics together so students can see more directly” how a technology ends up being used in industry.

Topolovac is studying programmable logic controllers at the nearby Sony Corp. television production plant. The controllers are the brains behind an automated assembly line. Sony will donate the necessary equipment to the school so that students can learn to send off-on commands to sensors and other devices that determine the nature of a particular factory line.

“A lot of students, college-bound or not, want to get into the course but can’t fit it to their schedules,” said junior Erick Chittick Jr., who takes French, journalism, American literature, American history and drama along with the tech course. “This is so much more challenging than the shops I took in junior high.”

But if Chittick were to return to his junior high today, he would find the changes equally comprehensive.

Bernardo Heights mentor teacher Jim Shadoan helped write the Exploring Tech curriculum at the middle-school level--in essence, a simplified version of the high school program.

“Eventually, we will introduce students to hands-on technology at my level, and they can then follow up with more sophisticated applications at the high school,” Shadoan said. In his own classes, the students proceed from computer-aided design problems to balsa-wood airplane construction to plastic injection molding of golf tees to digitizing video images into a computer to basic robotics.

Shadoan even has a technology course for gifted and talented students in Poway, as further proof of the belief among his colleagues that the new technology education “is as much academics as any other course.”

In San Diego Unified, the process has been much slower, although a cadre of industrial arts teachers has begun to interest principals and others who have been long accustomed to treating vocational education as the “black sheep” of district offerings.

“Our efforts have been a well-kept secret in many ways,” said Robert Atterbury, a specialist for the district’s school-to-work transition project team.

In addition to the 16 modules up-and-running at Montgomery Middle School, San Diego has small pilots at Standley Junior High and Hoover High schools. At Mann Middle School, the $60,000 worth of equipment needed for a top quality operation at either the middle-school or high-school levels also sits in a storeroom waiting for a qualified teacher to run the course in September.

“Poway did it up really nice but we are having to get funds here and there,” Atterbury said. “There’s a teacher at Crawford High now trying to make something happen with no extra dollars by remodeling the auto shop on his own time to become a technology lab.”

But in a district as large as San Diego--with 41 secondary schools--many veteran teachers are not able, or willing, to put in as much work writing up instructions for 16 or more modules as the Poway teachers have done, Atterbury said.

“We’ve got a bunch of teachers who are 55 years old or so, and it’s hard to get them to change unless you make it easy for most of them,” he said. For that reason, Atterbury and his colleagues have decided to purchase software and equipment that can be used with little or no initial changes by the teacher.

Heimburge, of San Diego’s Montgomery Middle School, said his students have reacted positively to the curriculum immediately during the two months he has been running the course at Montgomery.

“When the students transmit their voice over a beam of light they cannot even see, that really catches their interest,” Heimburge said. “A lot of these kids don’t realize that a CD player has a laser to make it all work. Little by little, they kids see that technology is not magic.

“I’m watching kids for the first time make the effort to read, where in more traditional settings they did not, and where rather than easily throwing in the towel, they’re trying to work through the problems and develop self-direction and stronger study skills. Hopefully, we’re planting a lot of seeds.”

Added Atterbury: “Not only does this help students, but we have had more (interest) in the last two months from principals and teachers and parents who want to set these programs up than we had toward (industrial arts) in the past 50 years.”