Getting Up to Speed

In a small, equipment-crammed room at Chaparral Middle School, Lucy Davis eases teachers into the computer age.

Some of her charges--teachers and administrators trying to learn how to handle Chaparral’s new, top-of-the-line computers--have PC experience. Others have none and grimace whenever their hesitant mouse-clicks yield unexpected results.

“You’re not going to hurt this computer,” Davis assured the school’s guidance counselor, who was wincing at the screen. “You’d have to take it out and run over it to hurt it.”

It is a scene played out across Ventura County, where efforts to arm the schools with the latest technology leave many instructors grappling to master the new machinery--computers their students use with frightening ease.

Davis, who teaches language arts, is one of several Chaparral teachers spearheading a months-long effort to update the school’s technology.

But with 10 new computers installed and 17 more coming soon, Davis and others now face the same question waiting for any school that ventures into the electronic universe: Once you have the equipment, what do you do with it?

The school is trying to decide how to work the new gadgets into Chaparral’s classrooms and curriculum. Meanwhile, Davis and others are working to bring all Chaparral teachers up to speed on the new equipment.

Training sessions before and after class teach the teachers how to keep files or design classroom presentations via computer.

“We have teachers who are afraid to touch a mouse, we’ve got teachers writing Internet pages--we’ve got them all,” Davis said. “We have to get them to the same starting point.”

Before the new machines arrived in late February, Chaparral had about 35 computers, Davis said. Half were clustered in the recently completed science wing. The rest, older models lacking the memory and speed necessary for Net surfing, were scattered around the building. Teachers who wanted to use the Internet in class brought their own computers from home.

Now, after months of effort, the 36-year-old school has been rewired, giving each classroom access to the Internet. The new computers, currently packed into a single room, will soon go to individual classrooms. The school eventually wants 16 to 17 computers in the library, Davis said.

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Across Ventura County, other school districts and individual schools have similar plans underway, some of them much further along than Moorpark’s. The Conejo Valley Unified School District, for example, currently boasts one computer for every 10 students, said Richard Simpson, the district’s assistant superintendent of instructional services.

In other districts, schools are making do with older machines, capable of word processing and little else. Clifford Rodrigues, technology and media director for the Ventura County superintendent of schools office, said many schools are in the same situation as Chaparral, trying to update their computers and provide Internet access.

“There’s still a lot of schools hooking up,” he said.

At Chaparral, teachers are now trying to learn the latest programs and get some idea how these new tools can become part of next year’s lesson plans.

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Christina Booth, a special education teacher, already has a computer in her classroom, but it is too old and weak to access the Internet. Once equipped with a new computer, she hopes to use the network to let her students write and receive e-mail from their counterparts in other countries.

“Have them get in touch with students who may be their age but from a totally different culture,” she said. “The Internet access is really the most exciting thing, to my mind.”

Bonita Burckin, who teaches language arts and history, will use the equipment to create tests and quizzes, as well as message her colleagues during the school day, when all are sequestered in their individual rooms. She has also started planning to incorporate online research into class projects next year.

Burckin notes, however, that many of her students are ahead of the game, already using online information in their homework and reports.

“I’ve seen a lot of electronic sources cited in their bibliographies,” she said.