Island colleges embracing educational technology

On Grymes Hill next month, every entering student at St. John's University will receive a university-issued wireless laptop computer -- a telling beginning to their college careers.

Down the road at Wagner College, freshmen will file into a history course and be introduced to the Middle Ages with a projected image: A bishop depicted on the lid of a burial vault as a skeleton ravaged by the Black Death.

And at the College of Staten Island, video-conferencing technology will create "virtual classrooms," uniting scholars at its Willowbrook campus with students in South Africa, China and Turkey.

In recent years, the availability of wireless Internet access has enabled students to stretch out on campus lawns not just for catnaps, but for research sessions.

FACULTY ON WEB, TOO

Faculty have increasingly used the Web to host classes, post course syllabi and broadcast class announcements, while university record systems have been adapted to allow students to view their grades and their course progress through personal accounts.

Latching onto the ubiquity of MP3 players, recorded lectures have started to become available as Podcasts in a national trend this year.

Staten Island's three institutions of higher learning have woven the development of educational technology into their mission statements, and increasingly, into their budgets.

"[Technology] enriches the presentation of material," said Dr. Michael Kress, vice president for technology systems at CSI.

In "media-rich" classrooms, where teachers can project sounds and images and manipulate them in increasingly sophisticated ways, technology can be used to communicate some concepts much more quickly than they could be conveyed through description alone.

Besides, said Dr. Kress, "Students of today's generation are used to getting information this way. That's how they learn."

Colleges in the borough and beyond are banking on it.

Wagner has made a two-year investment of $1 million in technology-assisted learning -- an unprecedented figure for the institution, which received half of those funds from a grant from the Richmond County Savings Foundation.

That grant will fund the creation of 18 media-rich classrooms, extend the availability of wireless connections on campus, purchase transportable hardware and provide training for faculty to foster the integration of new technology into their instruction, said Pat Schoknecht, Wagner's director of information technology.

TECHNOLOGY FEE

CSI charges full-time students an annual $70 technology fee that allows the college to count on a base of about $1.4 million a year to invest in similar improvements.

St. John's University is updating its campus technology with a five-year federal grant totaling more than $1.5 million, said Joseph Tufano, chief information officer. Students there can already get online wirelessly from anywhere but the dorm rooms; in 2004 and 2005, Intel Corp. ranked the university among its top 10 "most unwired college campuses" in the nation.

In the most equipped classrooms at CSI, touch-screens allow projected material to be manipulated by touch. On Smart Boards, multi-colored pens can mark images displayed on 60-inch computer screens. Other technologies allow teachers to display and manipulate information using lap-tops or tablets, allowing them to maintain eye-contact with students, said Dr. Kress.

Film clips and visual aids have helped material come alive for Traci Tucker, a senior and an arts administration student at Wagner.

"It's better than staring at a black chalkboard with white writing on it," said Ms. Tucker. "It's better than just having teachers preach to you."

But most any technology has its pitfalls.

"There is a glut of information, but there have not been any advances in the transformation of information into knowledge," opined Dr. Kress. "That's the part that teachers need to keep in mind."

Students, he said, often need time to process information, step-by-step:

"If the answer is blasted in front of them before they've had time to grapple with a concept in their own minds, the technology isn't being used in an effective way."

"I love it when teachers write on a blackboard and then stop to talk about what they've written," said Thomas (T.J.) Tauriello, also a Wagner senior.

"If they've got a power-point presentation with bulleted points, they move right on to the next point... and those classes can be boring."

STUDENTS SURVEYED

A national survey conducted in 2004 by the Educause Center for Applied Research found that funds spent on putting technology in college classrooms had a modest impact on learning.

Of more than 4,000 freshmen and seniors surveyed, 48.5 percent said the biggest benefit of classroom technology was convenience. Less than 13 percent said improved learning was the greatest benefit, and 3.7 percent said technology provided no benefit at all.

But students at St. John's have rated positively the use of technology in the classroom. About 80% of its students, responding to a survey in 2004 felt the university emphasized using computers in academic work; the same number of students rated instructors' use of computers as aids in instruction to be "effective" or "very effective" in surveys conducted internally each semester since 2002.

At its best, said Dr. Kress, technology in the classroom is applied to make learning more interactive.

Tauriello said his academic life has been most impacted by Facebook, an online directory that connects people through social networks, allowing him to keep in touch with his classmates to share notes and form study groups.

And where most technology is currently geared toward supplying information from teachers to students, Dr. Kress says the most leading-edge technology will help direct information from students to teachers.

Featured earlier this month at CSI, where the Discovery Institute held its inaugural Summer Technology Conference for Middle School Teachers, were "clicker systems" that would allow teachers to survey their students with a multiple choice question in real time, a la the "ask the audience" feature of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

Dr. Kress noted that such technology, to be implemented in pilot programs at the college this year, would allow teachers to adapt their presentations based on immediate feedback as to the effectiveness of the lesson.

Technology has already made information more readily available in the classroom. This system could help gauge immediately the effectiveness of that information, and the dollars that help disseminate it in the digital age.

Tevah Platt is a news reporter for the Advance. She may be reached at platt@siadvance.com.