NEW ORLEANS: Cisco’s 21st Century Classroom

In the wake of Katrina, several major corporations made major investments in rebuilding the New Orleans schools. Under John Chamber’s leadership, Cisco has poured an enormous amount of money into New Orleans schools to ensure every child has access to the technology of the 21st century classroom.

We toured several schools in Jefferson Parish that have incredible levels of classroom technology. Cisco funded 16 schools and the school District equipped the remainder at a total cost of $32 million. In addition, six new jobs have been created at the District level – Technology Integration Specialists – to aid the teachers in integrating all the technology into their teaching.

Each classroom has a touch sensitive, smart-board that cost about $10,000 and an Active Vote system – handheld voting devices. The teachers all have laptops for controlling the technology and there is a high speed Internet connection for accessing lessons and other content from the web. On the school-based server is a wide variety of software the teachers may retrieve through the school-wide wireless LAN. The teachers needed to go through a fairly rigorous training program and Cisco loaned several employees full-time to the District for training and consulting.

In one third grade class we saw a demo of how all of this technology and training comes together to create a 21st century learning experience for the children.

Comments

[education software]

I think this is a very interesting article. It is great that these schools were rebuilt with more technology. The technologies they have are often seen in college classrooms, but I haven't seen them used that often in elementary schools and/or middle schools.

[Dan Dage]

21st century learning? I don't think so. Yeah, the technology is there, but this is still a fact-based multiple choice format. While the response system allows *some* participation, it is at a pretty minimal level. Heck, many bars in the country had a response system exactly like this networked across the country where people could play trivia against each other in real time--- in 1990!

I think having a touchscreen interface for the kids' controllers ala iTouch would be more 21st century. Then we could have text-based responses instead of multiple choice. How many multiple choice tests were your students in India taking and preparing for, again?

I like your work, and am glad you've helped get this conversation going.