Tuned in to technology

By NATE HUBBARD/Staff

The director of instruction for Wythe County Public Schools has been elected to serve as secretary for the board of directors of a regional network designed to give students more educational opportunities through the use of electronic classrooms.
LaDonna Meade, in her second year on the board of the Southwest Virginia Education and Training Network, was named to her new position on April 24.
“I’m in more of a decision-making role,” she said. “It’s basically the board making the decisions about the future of the network.”
According to its Web site, SVETN is a partnership between multiple colleges and 16 public school divisions in the Southwest Virginia region.
Wythe County has been a part of the network since the mid-1990s, said Keith Cochran, technology supervisor for Wythe County’s public school division.
Cochran said each of the county’s high schools has one room equipped with cameras, monitors and a speaker system (George Wythe High School’s high-tech room is set up in the adjacent Wythe County Technical Center) that allows for interactive electronic classes to be conducted in classrooms at different schools by a single teacher.
Students in both the classroom with the teacher and the electronically-connected classroom can participate in real time discussions and ask questions during a lecture. A proctor typically monitors the students at the school without the teacher’s physical presence.
“When the classrooms are linked, it’s pretty instantaneous communication between the classrooms electronically,” Cochran said. “If they speak up, they’re heard immediately.”
SVETN also supports Internet-based classes used by Wythe County students.
Although Meade said the organizers of SVETN initially developed the network as a means to provide students with opportunities to take classes offered by other school divisions, she said the initiative in practice has been used independently by each participating school division and college.
“Originally, I think what SVETN envisioned was that, for example, Fort Chiswell could maybe get a course that’s being taught in Lee County,” she said.
The technology used by SVETN still provides those inter-school division possibilities, but Meade said scheduling differences has been the major stumbling block preventing more regional cooperation.
In Wythe County, Meade said SVETN is used to connect the countywide JROTC program and business law and foreign language classes. In the past is has also been used to offer physics and dual credit government and calculus classes.
“It gives our students an option for courses that they wouldn’t be able to take otherwise,” Meade said.
While SVETN has provided many benefits for the county, Meade said she’s not necessarily in favor of seeing more classes being taught electronically.
“Ideally we want a teacher standing up in front of every student,” she said.
But providing an electronic course offering is still an effective way to give students more class options under logistical constraints, Meade emphasized.
Cochran added that SVETN provides training for teachers conducting classes using the network. Although it may take instructors some time to get comfortable teaching with part of their students in another location, Cochran said the technical aspects of the system are simple to operate and can mostly be controlled through a single remote.
At the start of the 2007-08 school year, Cochran said the local school division also was able to upgrade to a faster fiber-optic connection.
He said the new connection improves SVETN capabilities, while the accompanying expanded bandwidth also allows the school system more flexibility for data transfer and storage independent of the regional network.
While Meade indicated that she won’t necessarily push to have more classes taught electronically, Cochran said there are other mostly untapped ways that SVETN use can be expanded in the future.
He said the network provides professional development capabilities for teachers and also could be used to allow school system administrators to meet remotely instead of traveling to a central location.
Nate Hubbard can be reached at 228-6611 or .