COVER STORY : Techno-Education : Area Schools Are Seeking to Expand Computer-Assisted Instruction

On the first day of school, a bilingual robot greets second-graders in teacher Audrey Swartz’s class, handing out stickers to “good listeners” and pointing out maps and puppets in the classroom.

“Hello boys and girls. Buenos dias. Welcome to Room 15,” says the 2-foot-tall robot, called Robie, its mouth blinking and eyes glowing like headlights.

Swartz used the robot to introduce her sneakered charges to the world of educational technology. Within a few weeks, her class at Linwood E. Howe School in Culver City will be programming the robot, creating multimedia reports on a personal computer, and studying the human body and nature by scanning bar codes into a laser disc player.

“I’m trying to be on the cutting edge,” said Swartz, 49. “I know that the kids are fascinated by it.”

In Culver City and numerous other schools on the Westside, technology is taking root in classrooms, from kindergarten to 12th grade. A move to equip schools with computers stalled in the late 1980s and early 1990s because of funding shortages, red tape and scarcity of teacher training. Today, many schools have developed creative ways to purchase technology and use it to benefit education.

It’s an uneven picture to be sure. Some schools have barely moved beyond Apple II labs, but others are installing high-speed data transmission cables to link classrooms and access the Internet, the worldwide information network.

But educators agree that an important new phase of the technological arms race has begun in earnest. With high-tech skills now critically important in the job market, they say, computer technology--once considered a luxury--is viewed as a dire necessity. And educators increasingly value computers as a new way to reach students.

“This is their future,” said Lynne Culp, an English teacher at University High School who is taking part in a pilot project to connect schools to the Internet. “Technology can be a route to stimulating learning.”

Not long ago, computers were considered exotic in schools. A computer lab usually was reserved for the use of a few gifted mathematics students--the “nerds.”

In the mid-1980s, more schools created bigger labs, mostly with a few first-generation Apple computers. The late 1980s brought the advent of on-line computer services and interactive CD-ROM software that features graphics, photographs and video footage, and the appeal of technology rapidly grew.

By then, however, most local schools were confronting budget problems. Many gave up on expanding computer technology programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while others struggled to maintain what they had.

Today, California ranks between 44th and 48th in the nation in average student-to-computer ratio, about 20 to 1, according to the state Department of Education.

Despite that ranking, however, there are signs that Westside schools are once again making technology a priority. This time, they’re doing it far more deliberately. In many cases, districts are putting far greater emphasis on planning, teacher training and raising money through parent booster clubs, local businesses and special grants.

All the Westside’s school districts--Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, Beverly Hills Unified, Culver City Unified and Los Angeles Unified--have either recently completed or are beginning to draft comprehensive technology plans.

The Santa Monica and Beverly Hills districts have both hired technology coordinators, people who will trouble-shoot and train teachers in the use of computers.

The Culver City district sets aside more than $100,000 a year to buy technology, such as multimedia carts, featuring an overhead projector, liquid crystal display panels, Macintosh computers, CD-ROM drives and speakers, for every school. Ultimately, every classroom will have its own cart. The district is currently equipping each classroom with cable television and telephone lines for voice and modem communications.

Santa Monica, meanwhile, boasts the Westside’s most technologically advanced high school library, with several CD-ROM databases, an on-line periodical service and a computerized card catalogue. One of its elementary schools, Rogers, plans to link all its classroom computers by November so that students can collaborate on projects and communicate through electronic mail.

The district also has begun equipping all classrooms with ethernet data transmission lines, which transmit information faster than regular telephone lines but not as fast as fiber-optic lines. Next year, Santa Monica High School plans to open a career technology lab that will include computer-aided design equipment, a computer-controlled lathe and an experimental wind tunnel.

Some districts are just turning the corner. Beverly Hills, for instance, hasn’t moved far beyond the late 1980s technologically. It has labs at all its schools, but new technology is sparse. The district also has an antiquated high school library where students still thumb through a card catalogue. Beverly Hills does, however, have plans to make technology a priority again, with hopes of wiring schools for faster data transmission over the next two years through use of a recently approved bond measure.

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The picture is wildly uneven in the Los Angeles Unified School District, with some schools on the cutting edge technologically and others far behind. LAUSD clearly lags behind other Westside districts in plans for installation of data transmission cables. District officials say it will be up to each school to arrange for data transmission hookups, and there’s no funding yet for internal classroom wiring, which district officials estimate will cost $100 million district-wide.

As much as it is financially feasible, the goal in most districts is to move away from the computer lab approach of the 1980s and toward the goal of a multimedia classroom--something like Swartz’s class in Culver City.

“Playing with a computer should be as natural an act for any child in the United States as using a toothbrush,” said Tina Harris-Rouquette, an instructor at Edison Elementary School in Santa Monica.

Such classrooms are scattered throughout the Westside. Swartz’s is one example. Although she only has two computers in the classroom, she makes sure that all the students get scheduled periods at the keyboard. Often they work in pairs, using software that she has tailored to go with each lesson. She links a liquid crystal display panel to an overhead projector so students can compose a class newspaper as a group. As Swartz taps computer keys, the students bark out instructions on everything from layout to content.

Other schools are taking their first steps in this direction.

Harris-Rouquette, for example, wants to introduce more students to technology in her school by creating a schoolwide bilingual newsletter at Edison, which is in Santa Monica’s poorest and most ethnically diverse neighborhood. In her program, she hopes to have gifted students work with students who struggle with basic reading and writing. She wants Spanish-speaking parents to brainstorm for newsletter topics and study English through the computer.

Using an $11,500 state technology grant and a district computer literacy grant, the school will get new computers with desktop publishing capabilities, and computers will go into every fourth- and fifth-grade classroom.

“What the technology brings for us is the opportunity for growth that is multiplied a million-fold,” Harris-Rouquette said.

Technology is also being used to reach some students who thus far have not been motivated to do schoolwork. Across town, at Olympic Continuation High School, English teacher Jack Casey has literally surrounded students with more than 20 computers. During four periods each day, about 90 youths, classified as at-risk by school officials, pass through his laboratory.

In many cases, the technology has interested these students in schoolwork for the first time. When the students are not reading, they work on the computers--practicing keyboard exercises, keeping personal journals, writing essays, connecting with the city’s electronic bulletin board or looking up facts on a CD-ROM encyclopedia.

One recent morning, Sean Syphers, a restless 18-year-old who has had trouble concentrating on schoolwork, drew a perfect likeness of the cartoon character Yosemite Sam on a computer. Another student listened to a Beethoven string quartet through headphones.

Casey says the computer has freed these students from years of frustration with penmanship and essay revision. The students write essays about their lives, and Casey displays these often emotionally wrenching pieces on a bulletin board in the hallway. Principal Ben Villa said he still gets chills when he recalls the essay written by a girl who witnessed the stillbirth of her godchild.

“One of the absolute joys in my life is to see the excitement in their eyes when they hit the ‘print’ button. . . . They can’t believe that they’ve done all this,” Casey said.

In Beverly Hills, sixth-graders at Hawthorne School use a special computer-friendly camera and a Macintosh to construct family trees. They incorporate photographs of their family members into the charts along with short descriptions of each person.

In Malibu, Joe DiMercurio, the librarian at Malibu High School, hopes that as his school goes on-line in the next year with the new ethernet classroom-to-classroom wiring, students can collaborate with peers from other schools, states and countries on science and social studies projects.

In the Hollywood area, students at Santa Monica Elementary School watch science and language lessons that are beamed into a satellite dish and taped for classroom use.

And in Pacific Palisades, Ryan Hill, a severely disabled 13-year-old with cerebral palsy, has single-handedly introduced countless teachers and peers to computer technology during his lifetime. Limited to the use of only one finger, he is able to “speak” and do class work only by tapping the keys of a talking computer attached to his wheelchair.

His mother, Diane, illustrates how parents have become crucial in raising money for school computer projects. In 10 years, she has written about 30 grants, winning about $60,000 for her son’s schools.

“The only way we knew anything was going on was through the computer. There was a lot of person in there,” she said.

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For all the success stories, there are plenty of examples of stalled progress.

Cost is a big factor. Hardware and software expenses are high enough, but schools also must contend with the costs of teacher training and technical support.

Stories abound of state-of-the-art labs that gather dust for a year or two because no one knows how to use them.

Another problem is bureaucracy.

Teacher Lynne Culp spent a couple of years on a fellowship learning about the wonders of the Internet. When she returned to University High last year, she says, she learned that Los Angeles Unified would charge her school $650 to have a technician install a phone line so the school could hook up to the network. A private telephone company would do the same job for about $50, she protested.

District officials say they’re forming a focus group to study the $650 figure, which they say also covers future charges for telephone service.

Then there is the problem of “techno-phobia” among teachers, many of whom are reluctant to use a tool that their students understand better than they do. And training isn’t easy.

It’s particularly difficult in Los Angeles Unified, where many teachers are frustrated by salary cuts, strike threats and overcrowded classrooms.

“We have a lot of people who feel like, ‘Don’t bother me with this stuff,’ ” said Beverly Taylor, librarian at Hollywood High School.

Generally, large districts appear to have a harder time gearing up technologically than do smaller ones. Los Angeles Unified has so far been unable to spread computer technology uniformly across its estimated 600 schools.

The district’s instructional technology office is small, with five specialists who tend to the demands of all the schools. Each specialist usually has a waiting list of five or six schools seeking assistance with technology. Maintenance requests take at least a week to handle. Teacher training occurs at training centers that teachers attend on their own time. Last year, only 1,100 teachers out of 30,000 received technology training.

“It’s a drop in the bucket,” said Vic Placeres, director of the school information systems branch.

The result is that, in Los Angeles Unified, schools are very much on their own as they try to enter the technological age.

On the Westside, Los Angeles Unified’s student-to-computer ratio in 1993 ranged from an outstanding 2-to-1 ratio at the Open School, a magnet elementary school in West Los Angeles that has been adopted by one of Apple’s top executives, to a dismal 83-to-1 ratio at Selma Elementary in Hollywood.

Selma had suffered numerous break-ins and thefts over the years. Lucky for Selma, the school was completely rebuilt recently and equipped with a burglar alarm system. And Principal Doris Dent is using some of the reconstruction money to buy new computers. She also plans to apply to the state for technology grants.

“With our class sizes, it’s important to have things that kids can look forward to,” Dent said.

Playa del Rey Elementary, a school with a 67 to 1 student-to-computer ratio, hasn’t been so fortunate.

Principal Sharon Langman says the school booster club in her working-class neighborhood cannot raise much money. Her students don’t qualify for federal funding for the poor and disadvantaged because income levels aren’t low enough. Such funding would enable them to purchase computers. And there hasn’t been anyone on staff who has the expertise to write an application for a technology grant.

“I’m afraid that things are changing so fast that we won’t be able to keep up with it,” Langman said. “If our children are to compete in the 21st Century, they need to have the latest technology.”

One of Los Angeles Unified’s bright spots is the Pacific Palisades complex of schools, where teachers and parents have been invigorated by winning charter school status, a step that gives the schools more autonomy in budgeting and decision-making, said Christine Maxwell, a longtime technology teacher.

Like many Los Angeles Unified schools, Pacific Palisades has its share of antique Apples, but it also has a high-tech library with everything from a CD-ROM encyclopedia to an on-line atlas.

In Pacific Palisades, as in other Westside communities with successful computer programs, officials say the key in recent years has been consistent support from the schools, the parents, business people and others.

That backing, says Culver City Unified’s Audrey Swartz, has been good news for her students.

“We live in the age of technology and that seems to be the way we learn,” Swartz said. “It seems like they will definitely be prepared for the future.”