[LINK] Wi-Fi Turns Rowdy Bus Into Rolling Study Hall

David Boxall david.boxall at hunterlink.net.au
Mon Mar 22 16:07:12 AEDT 2010


After 16 years commuting more than three hours per day, I can see 
advantages in this.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/education/12bus.html>
By SAM DILLON 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/sam_dillon/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: February 11, 2010

VAIL, Ariz. — Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each 
year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and 
stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, 
shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).

But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway 
just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.

Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school 
officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal 
frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the 
Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an 
old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed 
what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and 
behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.

“It’s made a big difference,” said J. J. Johnson, the bus’s driver. 
“Boys aren’t hitting each other, girls are busy, and there’s not so much 
jumping around.”

On this morning, John O’Connell, a junior at Empire High School 
<http://ehs.vail.k12.az.us/> here, is pecking feverishly at his MacBook, 
touching up an essay on World War I for his American history class. 
Across the aisle, 16-year-old Jennifer Renner e-mails her friend Patrick 
to meet her at the bus park in half an hour. Kyle Letarte, a sophomore, 
peers at his screen, awaiting acknowledgment from a teacher that he has 
just turned in his biology homework, electronically.

“Got it, thanks,” comes the reply from Michael Frank, Kyle’s teacher.

Internet buses may soon be hauling children to school in many other 
districts, particularly those with long bus routes. The company 
marketing the router, Autonet Mobile 
<http://www.autonetmobile.com/about/>, says it has sold them to schools 
or districts in Florida, Missouri and Washington, D.C.

Karen Cator, director of education technology 
<http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/index.html?src=oc>at the 
federal Department of Education, said the buses were part of a wider 
effort to use technology to extend learning beyond classroom walls and 
the six-hour school day. The Vail District, with 18 schools and 10,000 
students, is sprawled across 425 square miles of subdivision, mesquite 
and mountain ridges southeast of Tucson. Many parents work at local 
Raytheon 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/raytheon_company/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
and I.B.M. 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/international_business_machines/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
plants. Others are ranchers.

The district has taken technological initiatives before. In 2005, it 
inaugurated Empire High as a digital school, with the district issuing 
students laptops instead of textbooks, and more than 100 built-in 
wireless access points offering a powerful Internet signal in every 
classroom and even on the football field.

“We have enough wireless to make your fillings hurt,” says Matt 
Federoff, the district’s chief information officer.

District officials got the idea for wiring the bus during occasional 
drives on school business to Phoenix, two hours each way, when they 
realized that if they doubled up, one person could drive and the other 
could work using a laptop and a wireless card. They wondered if Internet 
access on a school bus would increase students’ academic productivity, too.

But the idea for the Internet Bus really took shape in the fall, when 
Mr. Federoff was at home, baby on his lap, and saw an advertisement in 
an electronics catalog offering a “Wi-Fi hotspot in your car.”

“I thought, what if you could put that in a bus?” he said. The router 
cost $200, and came with a $60 a month Internet service contract. An 
early test came in December, when bus No. 92 carried the boys’ varsity 
soccer team to a tournament nearly four hours away. The ride began at 4 
a.m., so many players and coaches slept en route. But between games, 
with the bus in a parking lot adjacent to the soccer field, players and 
coaches sat with laptops, fielding e-mail messages and doing homework — 
basically turning the bus into a Wi-Fi cafe, said Cody Bingham, the bus 
driver for the trip.

Mariah Nunes, a sophomore who is a team manager, said she researched an 
essay on bicycle safety.

“I used my laptop for pretty much the whole ride,” Mariah said. “It was 
quieter than it normally would have been. Everybody was pumped about the 
games, and there were some rowdy boys. But the coach said, ‘Let’s all be 
quiet and do some homework.’ And it wasn’t too different from study hall.”

Ms. Bingham recalled, “That was the quietest ride I’ve ever had with 
high schoolers.”

Since then, district officials have been delighted to see the amount of 
homework getting done, morning and evening, as Mr. Johnson picks up and 
drops off students along the highway that climbs from Vail through the 
Santa Rita mountains to Sonoita. The drive takes about 70 minutes each way.

One recent afternoon, with a wintry rain pelting the bus, 18-year-old 
Jeanette Roelke used her laptop to finish and send in an assignment on 
tax policy for her American government class.

Students were not just doing homework, of course. Even though Dylan 
Powell, a freshman, had vowed to devote the ride home to an algebra 
assignment, he instead called up a digital keyboard using GarageBand, a 
music-making program, and spent the next half-hour with earphones on, 
pretending to be a rock star, banging on the keys of his laptop and 
swaying back and forth in his seat.

Two seats to the rear, Jerod Reyes, another freshman, was playing SAS, 
an online shooting game in which players fire a machine gun at attacking 
zombies.

Vail’s superintendent, Calvin Baker, says he knew from the start that 
some students would play computer games.

“That’s a whole lot better than having them bugging each other,” Mr. 
Baker said.

-- 
David Boxall | The more that wise people learn
| The more they come to appreciate
http://david.boxall.id.au | How much they don't know.
--Confucius




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