Between May and August 2001, Tolaga Bay Area School improved its computer to student ratio ten-fold, going from 1:30 to 1:3.

The school installed a thin client computing network based on three powerful IBM servers and 86 recycled Computer Access NZ (CANZ) computers, supplied under the ICT componentÊ (Te Rangitawaea) of a schooling improvement partnership between Ngati Porou and the Ministry of Education, called Whaia Te Iti Kahurangi.

Nineteen East Coast schools are in the Te Rangitawaea programme, which is now linked with a broader education ICT development programme that includes schools further south in the Gisborne and Wairoa regions. The collective title for this programme is Kaupapa Ara Whakawhiti Matauranga (KAWM).

A summary of the equipment installed at Tolaga Bay Area School is at the end of this interview.

Interview

You were the first school on the East Coast to do this, weren't you?
Nori: We've been the pilot school on the East Coast for this thin client network project.
Manny: Currently another three schools have the servers, but their client PCs aren't set up yet. At the moment only Tolaga Bay school has everything running.

You're the guinea pigs then? Was this just the way things worked out, or is it intentional?
Nori: They wanted to establish one school properly with the thin client network and then translate that experience onto the other 18 schools.

Nori Parata, principal of Tolaga Bay Area School

Why were you selected?
Nori: I jumped up and down and shouted the loudest! (Laughs) Well, partly that is true, but also this school was the first to get its cabling done.

Manny: It's also because of the size of the school – it's the biggest on the East Coast.

Who paid for putting in the cables?
Nori:We went to the Ministry of Education's Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS); however that only covered a relatively minor part of the cost. It cost us $40,000 to cable the school, and this had been part of the board [of trustee's] strategic plan. They wanted to ensure the whole school was cabled so that every room in the school had access to the system should we want to.

What is your role, Manny?
My designation is KAWM ICT technician, and there are two of us on the East Coast. I cover seven schools from Te Puia Springs to Whangara. My role is to coordinate with the KAWM implementations manager, systems integrator, and the relevant suppliers in order to procure the equipment for the schools. Then I do the installations, and provide ongoing maintenance.

Rhonda Tibble, ICT lead teacher at Tolaga Bay Area School with year 8 students

What software are you using?
Rhonda: At the moment our thin client network just has the Microsoft Office 2000 suite, plus Microsoft Paint. So the programs I've introduced the students to so far are Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Publisher. We haven't looked at Access yet. At the primary level, from year 2 to 6, we're giving the students one hour a week of skills based learning on these programs – for ten weeks last term and three weeks so far this term.

At this stage at the secondary level the skills learning has been similar, but from year 11 – and particularly by year 13, they're also completing level 1 to 3 Unit Standards in computing. By the end of last term, most of the senior students had pretty well mastered the MS Office programs and were slowly moving towards boredom. They're moving toward multimedia now and are really excited about the potential that exists within this medium.

What about publishing and graphics programs like Photoshop and PageMaker?
Nori: We have both of those, but not on the thin client network. The kids, especially in the senior school, have had a lot of access to teachers' laptops, and that's where they've built some multimedia projects to present on the Datashow. It's one of the shortcomings of our system at the moment. Well not a shortcoming – just a brief pause – we're waiting for Aiscorp and IBM to tell us when we can put other software on our server – it's been a source of frustration for a few weeks. The upside to that is that in the meantime our kids have become very proficient in Word, Powerpoint, and Excel.

How well is the system working in a technical sense?
Nori: There were a lot of issues around getting the jolly stuff here in the first place – but once it arrived, and the server was installed and the PCs put out into classrooms, it went very smoothly – Manny did an excellent job of setting it up. In fact, when Aiscorp and IBM came here last week they told us it was the tidiest installed system they had ever seen, so Manny got a Principal's Award for that!

Once it was up, as a school we became dependent on it very quickly. The one and only time we had a slight hiccup, it was like the world had come to an end around here. You know how people get dependent on technology?

One of the interesting things for the kids was that they could go to a computer anywhere in the school, log themselves on, and see their own work on the screen. They found that amazing for the first few weeks. "How does this computer know that my work should be here when I did it over on the other one?" They really thought that was intriguing.

How fast do the recycled machines run on the thin client network?
Manny: The 486s run Office 2000 at almost the same speed as a standalone Pentium II. Pretty instant.

What are you getting out of the installation educationally, at this stage? Is it too early to ask you that yet?
Nori: Not at all. Ninety percent of the children were immediately attracted to the computers. One group of boys with learning difficulties discovered the joys of writing and editing at the keyboard. Previously they gave us no written work at all. Now we get a decent quantity of work out of them and we're even able to work on things like punctuation, grammar, and content. So that was an immediate benefit.

Rhonda: I'm noticing how quickly the 6- to 8-year-olds can pick up the pathways, in terms of different bits and pieces. You can show them around different applications. For example, getting all children within a 50 minute learning period to understand that you need certain toolbars on in order to move around particular functions and getting them to realise what zoom feature their page might be on.

Year 2 to 8 students were able to create their own bar graphs within two sessions. And this term I could say, "Right, I've shown you how to make a bar graph – now I want you to create your own data and your own diagram and I'll see if you can remember what to do."

Just yesterday one boy went home to his mum's computer expecting her to have Excel, because he wanted to look at his last year's report, count how many ticks he got for "I usually" or "I sometimes" or "I consistently" and do a bar graph on that. It's good that they can see how ICT skills can be applied towards something that is of interest to them. For that particular child and his mother, it was phenomenal.

Teachers are asking students to find an authentic situation to create a bar graph. Doing bar graphs and statistics in primary school can be frustrating for children – having to draw all the lines and count how many bars they have to colour in. Using Excel's bar graphs for statistical purposes means that that particular learning strand can be moved along much faster than if they had to do it manually.

Nori: Another area where the kids have learned quite quickly is creating their own digital portfolios. I thought we'd have a rush of kids wanting to print everything in sight they had created, as usually happens when you put children on computers. But they quickly developed a digital portfolio mentality, and only print out a final draft of Powerpoints or whatever they've been working on if it's really necessary. They're happy to show their parents or anyone else what they've been working on, on the screen. That's saving a few trees being cut down.

Much of the learning at present is skills based, and as with anything new, using the technology for anything and everything. We want to move our students to a higher level order of thinking in the use of the technologies whereby they think critically about why they are using a particular technology or software as opposed to say paint, paper or a pen and pencil. We also don't want a whole lot of whistles and bells project presentations that lack content depth and purpose. I think our society is superficial enough already without adding to it any more.

Rhonda: We had a good example last week of how quickly students figure the system out. One lunchtime we were sitting in the staffroom, which has two PCs and a printer – part of the school network. All of a sudden the printer started up. A teacher pulled out the page that appeared, and it was a message from a year 7 student in a classroom – kids are allowed to use the PCs during break times, as long as they are responsible. The message read, "Dear Mrs Harrison, Dexter keeps kicking my chair and he won't leave me alone. Please come down here." So Mrs Harrison went down to sort the problem out, and Dexter had no idea how she'd known what he was doing. Just shows how quickly kids learn how to find out which printer they want to print on.

What's been the community reaction?
Nori: They're absolutely thrilled, and we're getting a lot of requests to run computer classes for adults. In fact we've had a few adults enrol in classes with the senior students. We will start to run community classes later this year but we want our servers to be fully tuned before we add more users.

Are there other learning outcomes you'd like to mention?
Rhonda: One of the big things in terms of learning pedagogy is the notion of cooperative learning. ICT lends itself to peer or cooperative learning. An example is, I'll show the whole class something, then I'll send them off to do it. Then I'll show one student an extension to what they've been doing, and the extension proliferates – that student becomes the resident expert and is quite happy to run along and help the next student. It's peer-to-peer learning in a way I haven't seen operate in any other curriculum area in the school. Not to the same extent anyway – where students get instant gratification from what they've learned. They feel empowered that they have a skill they can pass on. Very instantaneously – I like that aspect of it.

Are you using computers in the school's te reo Maori immersion unit?
Rhonda: We have 36 students in the immersion unit from years 1 to 8. I give them exactly same ICT skills lessons as the mainstream children.

Nori: Rhonda teaches it to them in te reo Maori. Most of the programs are still in English, but you can get the Word menu bar in Maori.

Rhonda: The instruction is te reo Maori, but what's actually on the application programs is still English, and I personally believe they shouldn't be changed to Maori, because of the general environment. Not every child can get a PC that's been tuned to te reo Maori. But te reo Maori should not be a reason why they cannot learn.

What is being done to teach the teachers?
Nori: All our teachers have been given their own laptops under the Te Rangitawaea scheme, and they're about to finish a 10-week online tutorial programme. Every teacher has gone online with a tutor for a 2-hour session each week, with teachers from other East Coast schools. Rhonda is one of the tutors. The tutorial programme has been put together by Educa, a Whakatane based firm. As well as being online each week and they've been doing assignments and e-mailing them to their tutors.

Rhonda: Thirty-seven East Coast teachers have been involved in this. They've looked at things like Microsoft Office; web page building; email and listserv discussion groups;Ê and TKI and other web resources for teachers. We've had four online groups. One group of eight teachers with more ICT experience has looked at more advanced topics, including web page design. The other three groups are primary, secondary, and immersion. Guest speakers have talked to them online about educational initiatives applicable to this region. In the holidays we had face-to-face sessions where we looked at extension activities within multimedia presentations. This term they've discussed creating teaching and learning projects based on the sum total of learning that they've had to date. The aim has been to create a digital resource that will help their teaching, learning and administrative needs as teachers.

Part of the ongoing teacher support programme has been the appointment of ICT Facilitator positions which are paid by the Ministry of Education. Our facilitator, Ani Pahuru-Huriwai, works on pilot projects with teachers in our school and helps us integrate ICT with the curriculum. She concentrates on teachers who are least confident with ICT and works across the 19 Ngati Porou East Coast Schools.

Nori: You know, I can't over emphasise how supportive and instrumental the Whaia Te Iti Kahurangi team have been with this project. Quite simply without the Ministry of Education and Te Runanga o Ngati Porou partnership we would just not be doing what we're doing now.

Are there any plans to connect with home computers?
Nori: Yes, part of the school's strategic direction, particularly for senior students, is to get recycled computers into homes. Students would be able to dial up to the school server to get their own work, but more than that, to access the free Internet line we have. Many of our families can't afford the Internet connection, let alone the computer itself. We expect to trial that with some of our year 12 and 13 students.

We need to move into an e-learning environment very quickly, because we don't have the numbers to sustain courses with teachers in front of them here in the school. With all this technology around we don't need to – so yes we do want students to be able to chat with their tutors at Correspondence School, at Waikato University, or wherever they're doing courses, but using our system.

There is a move toward providing video lessons for East Coast schools, isn't there?
Nori: Yes, but we don't have the bandwidth here to join it. We only have just your ordinary telephone lines and a 56K modem. It's happening at Ngata College and Te Kura Kaupapa Maori O Te Waiu o Ngati Porou in their wharekura, and at Te Waha o Rerekohu Area School, but they have ISDN and frame relay up at their end.

Is bandwidth likely to improve in the near future?
Nori: Last February the Government asked communication businesses to look at how they could service isolated areas like ours, and I understand there has been some discussion with, I think BCL, to provide links for here through a microwave dish or something similar. We can't wait, because then we'll be able to have multi-user access to the Internet and video conferencing.

What sort of access do students have to the Internet now?
Nori: None through the thin client network. But we should be able to provide access this term. We do have a couple of PCs with direct lines which students use for research, but they have to book – it's a bit of a time squeeze.

What major problems still need to be solved before ICT works the way you want it to?
Nori: Bandwidth is the major issue. As well as giving us better Internet access and letting us join video classrooms, faster communications links would let us participate in a "server farm" that's planned as part of the KAWM initiative. If this server farm is set up, schools like ours will be able to access it as part of a wide area network. We'll have access to more application programs and back up our files there. We'd be part of a huge distributed school covering all the East Coast and down to Wairoa. That's about 14,000 students!

Another current issue for us is getting more software onto our server – starting with programs like Photoshop or Photo Suite – because the kids are very adept at using the digital camera and the movie camera. They can do processing on teachers' laptops, but they can't put material into their own folders on the thin client system yet. For editing of video we'd like to get an iMac, which hopefully would be compatible with the thin client network at some point.

In years 7 and 8, their theme in technology classes at the moment is to design boxes for holding their favourite hamburger. They have to make a package for it and they're designing it in the computer suite. Then in English they're doing a complementary visual language module in which they write an advertisement for their hamburger package. So you can see how we're integrating all this stuff. But we don't yet have the software that will allow us to put moving images into their digital portfolios. In food technology they get to make the product before they package it. It's all very integrated. There's a science and maths component to it as well.

Does your school have website and e-mail address it's happy to publicise?
Nori: We did have a website, but we couldn't keep it up because we didn't have the technology – that's something we aim to do in the next year. We want to give every class and extra-curricular activity group its own pages on a website. In the meantime, people can contact us at tolaga.school@uawa.ac.nz.

I've never interviewed a more enthusiastic pair of teachers about ICT before!
Rhonda: We are passionate about this!