W I R E L E S S S O C I E T Y
Old School, New Tricks
Students at Brooklyn's Packer school are field testing the wireless future. And you thought high school was tough
By Lev Grossman
November 3, 2003
Some of us still remember the first time we saw a computer. I saw
mine in 1977. It was a Commodore PET 2001 (a Personal Electronic
Terminal). It was squat and beige and not particularly personal,
and its sole function was to play a game called Hunt the Wumpus,
which seemed like a fair and adequate justification for its
existence to a second-grader. As the year was 1977, the PET was
kept in the school's fallout shelter, which otherwise was
unoccupied owing to a lack of fallout.
None of the students at the Packer Collegiate Institute in
Brooklyn, N.Y., will have the same sort of memory. For them,
computers have always been there, a fact of life, in a way that
no generation before theirs has experienced. Packer is at the
cutting edge of an educational movement in the U.S. that is
integrating laptop computers into middle schools and high
schools--they're known as "laptop schools." But Packer has taken
the idea a step farther. Its entire campus has been turned into a
wireless Internet-access zone. Wherever they go, whatever they're
doing--whatever they're supposed to be doing--Packer students are
in constant high-bandwidth contact with the school, with one
another and with the Internet at large. In essence, Packer has
added an invisible fourth dimension to its campus. But life in
the fourth dimension is somewhat different from what the Packer's
faculty anticipated. Can education survive the age of nonstop
information?
For a school of the future, the Packer Collegiate Institute has a
pretty fancy past. It was founded in 1845 (it's the oldest
independent school in Brooklyn) and it occupies a cluster of
architecturally distinguished buildings in downtown Brooklyn,
including a 19th century church complete with vaulted ceilings
and stained-glass windows. Packer has an impressive pedigree, a
highly competitive admissions policy and an extremely hefty
tuition bill, and in 1999 the school's administrators took a look
at their computer lab and deemed it unworthy of the Packer name.
The staff decided that to keep pace with the galloping ubiquity
of computers in the world at large, Packer had to get its
computers out of the lab and into the classroom in a new and
radical way.
To say that this plan met with misgivings from teachers and
parents would be an understatement. Would the kids use the
technology to cheat? Would they become cyborg Stepford children?
Would they, Brooklyn being Brooklyn, get mugged for their laptops
after class? "I was worried about how it was going to affect
their focus in the classroom," remembers Rebecca Boucher, who has
four kids at Packer. "Their interaction, their basic eye-to-eye
contact, even. Was it going to become an isolating experience? I
was very unclear how it was going to work." The teachers were the
ones who would have to answer that question, and they didn't know
either. "How would I do this?" said a sixth-grade teacher. "I did
not have the skills. The kids are better at it than I am!"
The wireless Packer would be very different from the old Packer.
All assignments, handouts, work sheets, what-have-you would be
distributed electronically. (Thus rendering the copy machine,
possibly the only device on earth less reliable than the
computer, obsolete.) Students would take notes on their laptops
in class, then take their laptops home and do their homework on
them. To turn in an assignment, they would simply drag and drop
it into the appropriate folder, where the teacher could
wirelessly retrieve it. Voila: the paperless classroom.
By the fall of 2001, the system was ready to go live. Christina
Devitt, Packer's cheerful, indefatigable director of technology,
and her team placed 50 wireless transceivers around the
school--unassuming, almost unnoticeable little boxes that flooded
the campus with wireless signals. Two grades, sixth and ninth,
were selected to be the school's inaugural cybernauts. Their
parents were required to buy laptops for them on their own dime:
Apple iBooks for the sixth-graders, Dell Windows machines for the
older kids--the idea was to give students a look at both sides of
the personal computing world. To kick things off in style, the
staff held an Out of the Box event at which the kids unpacked and
were introduced to their electronic sidekicks for the first time.
"There was an incredible amount of excitement and energy," Alan
Bernstein, Packer's assistant head, recalls. "It was sort of like
unwrapping Christmas presents." Out of the Box days have since
become an annual Packer tradition.
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