Chapel Hill Technology Advisory Committee

[Will R <chtechboard AT yahoo.com>]

It's a Microsoft joint experiment but I can find analogues to all their tech 
using FOSS. 

>From http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Business/story?id=1049526&page=1

Aug. 31, 2005 — Imagine a school of the future, where students use laptops in 
a wireless building
and teachers customize lessons according to each one's ability. The building 
itself is entirely
environmentally friendly, and all administrative processes are efficiently 
handled with the latest
technology.

In Philadelphia, the future is set to begin in September 2006.

The School of the Future, a partnership with Microsoft, is being built in 
West Philadelphia for
about 800 high school students. The approximately $63 million facility is 
being funded by the
School District of Philadelphia's capital program, with technical assistance 
provided by
Microsoft's Partners in Learning initiative.

Half of the students will come from the West Philadelphia region, the rest 
from other parts of the
city, said Paul Vallas, chief executive officer of the district. A lottery 
will be held if
applicants exceed the amount of openings, but the drawing will be random, not 
based on academic
achievement.

"We didn't want it to be an elite magnet school," Vallas said. "If you're 
going to do this high
school for the future and see how technology can help instruction and student 
achievement, turning
it into a select-enrollment school, choosing the best and brightest, would 
rig the experiment so
to speak."

Improving Instruction, Adding Resources

>From Microsoft's perspective, the goal is to create a school where learning 
>is "more continuous,
more relevant and more adaptive," said academic program manager Mary 
Cullinane.

She said the school will "break down the dependency on time and place" by 
sharing resources at
school and at students' homes, as well as by utilizing such sites as the 
nearby Philadelphia Zoo,
Philadelphia Museum of Art and the city's historic district to bring learning 
to life.

Vallas said he hopes the school will "in effect become an R&D center for the 
district as a whole."

"The object was to use technology in a way to do three things: improve the 
quality of instruction;
two, provide the students with the supplements they would need to enhance 
student achievement; and
three, improve communications between the teacher and what's happening in the 
classroom and the
parent or guardian," Vallas said. "That's been the goal of the district."

......



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