Laptops Bring the World to Rural Schoolhouse

The kids trooping into the one-room schoolhouse in this tiny cattle ranching community stomp the snow off their boots, hang up their coats, then go straight to the cabinet where their individual laptop computers have been charging overnight.

“All the other schools I’ve been to, they don’t have laptops. They only have computers in libraries,” said fourth-grader Anthony Pirruccello, whose mother moved here to take over as teacher at Brothers School at the beginning of the school year.

“We’re out in the middle of nowhere, and we get all this stuff,” Anthony said, spreading his hands to indicate the bounty of technology around him. “It’s pretty amazing.”

Brothers is a wide spot in U.S. 20 close to the geographic center of Oregon--sagebrush country where cattle and jack rabbits far outnumber people. Though 100 or so folks show up for the school Christmas pageant, the town is just a gas station-restaurant-post office, the school, a highway maintenance station, a few vacant buildings and a weathered cattle chute.

A year ago, when they were still in the little red schoolhouse built in 1928, the children of Brothers struggled like students throughout the country with mismatched aging computers that often didn’t work, had slow and spotty access to the Internet, and were more toy than tool.

Spurred by a poor state evaluation, the school board decided to hitch the new school they were building to the future, said former school Supt. Lee Chapman.

When a fiber-optic cable came down the pike, they hooked in. With special grants, help from the Crook-Deschutes Education Service District, and a teacher who thinks outside the box, the 18 students in grades K-8 now do their reading, writing and arithmetic on individual laptops, each with a wireless high-speed Internet connection.

“Some of [the students] have electricity only by generator and they don’t have running water at home,” said teacher Ann Pirruccello. “They come to school and they’ve got access to the world.”

For as long as there have been personal computers, schools have been trying to get them into classrooms, but not many can match Brothers School.

“While virtually all the schools in the United States now have some Internet access and some computers in some classrooms, it is the rare school that has ubiquitous or universal access to the tools--to computers and connectivity to the outside world,” said Linda Roberts, former director of the Educational Technology Initiative in the U.S. Education Department.

Brothers School has 20 Apple iBook laptops, so each child has one with his or her name on it. A wireless radio network system know as AirPort lets the children take their laptops anywhere in the classroom, and even outside to the playground. The hardware cost about $41,000.

“The trick is to integrate the technology into the curriculum,” said education consultant Bob Valiant, a former school superintendent who visits classrooms throughout the state advising teachers. “If you just tell kids to get on the Internet and learn something, nothing happens.”

Children use their laptops for reading, writing and math drills, using CD-ROMs from the Computer Curriculum Corp. They also keep a science journal. A digital camera lets them scan in pictures. The pupils in fifth through eighth grade surf the Net to learn about attractions in Washington, D.C., where they are going on their spring field trip. They just received e-mail addresses.

Pirruccello finds the computers make it easier to put students on individual learning tracks, and spot the places they need help. Where she would normally spend hours grading workbooks, the software does it automatically, gaining her 20 hours a week.

The Internet is particularly valuable given their remote location.

“When we had the Seattle earthquake, the kids logged onto CNN.com immediately and started researching earthquakes and fault lines on the Internet,” she said.

Although a lack of money and teacher training are holding back computer use in schools, Microsoft’s Anytime Anywhere Learning program, which teams up with Toshiba to put personal laptop systems in classrooms, has grown from 52 schools in 1995 to more than 800 now, serving 125,000 students, said program manager Mary Cullinane.

That is less than half of 1% of the nation’s 33.5 million public school students. While the Education Department reports 95% of public schools were connected to the Internet in 1999, it also reports 66% of teachers feel only somewhat or not at all prepared to deal with it. The agency also reports six students per computer nationwide.

“This notion of the ubiquitous computer, where you have it with you 24-7, is very powerful--for the teacher as well as for students,” said education consultant Saul Rockman, who has been studying Microsoft’s Anywhere Anytime Learning program.

“It changes the classroom from a lecture-mode type of environment to one that is much more project-based--kids collaborating with each other to accomplish a piece of work. There is much more contact with the real world, because you have access to e-mail and Web sites, well beyond what is normally in a classroom.”

“It also shifts the roles people play,” he said. “Students become teachers. When they learn something technical, they can teach other kids in the school and even the teacher. You find that some kids who are not great learners in the traditional manner turn out to be phenomenal with new strategies for learning.”

Jeff and Runinda McCormack are cattle ranchers whose children--Holli, 13, and Tyler, 11--go to Brothers School. Jeff went to Brothers School himself. Runinda is chairman of the school board and uses a computer to keep the ranch’s books at home, though their Internet access is spotty.

“It just made sense,” Runinda said of investing in computers for the school. “We want our kids to have an extra step on computers as a way of life.”

Jeff sees the biggest difference in the reports his kids write. They cite a wide variety of sources taken from the Internet, rather the encyclopedia he used as a boy.

“We can’t even help with the homework anymore,” he laughed.

The computers aren’t just for youngsters.

After dropping her three children off, Sonjia Zobrist, whose husband is a ranch hand, sits at a spare desktop to check out the Internet for the latest on the death of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhart.

“I don’t have a computer at home,” Zobrist said. “When [the teacher] asked me if I wanted to go on the computer, it was, ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ .”

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On the Net:

Anytime Anywhere Learning: https://www.microsoft.com/education/aal/

State Technology Offices: https://www.ed.gov/technology/statetech.html