WiFi high school goes online in Ontario: teachers and administrators opt for handhelds for classwork and admin tasks.

NORTH GRENVILLE DISTRICT HIGH SCHOOL is located north of the border in Kemptville, Ontario, but by placing palmOne handheld wireless computers in the hands of its 35 teachers this school about 45 minutes south of the Canadian capital Ottawa has moved to the heart of a brave new world.

"We're the only school in our district--which consists of 22 secondary schools and 122 schools all together--where all of the staff have handhelds," says Principal Steve McLean, who adds that his may be the only school in Ontario, and, for that matter all of Canada, to be using handhelds across the board.

This fall, North Grenville High installed a new WiFi wireless network. And currently, the school is upgrading its palmOne fleet to WiFi-enabled Tungsten C models and adding eSIS software from Media-X that will let teachers take attendance with a click.

North Grenville's approach to the mundane but complicated daily task of attendance taking is only the latest in North Grenville's effort to make teachers, administrators, and staff more productive by using handhelds. That process began under McLean's leadership three years ago.

"In Canada, they've certainly been a leader," says educational partner Steve Moretti, president of software maker Media-X in Ottawa. "They've seen what the technology could do, and they've stayed the course."

"It had been a long time since we invested educationally in teachers in a meaningful way, and I started to look at whether using handhelds could be valuable," McLean recalls. "It took me about a year to work through this with staff because I was [needlessly] concerned about using any budget that we had available on something our people weren't going to support."

Nevertheless, two years ago, McLean purchased a set of palmOne handhelds and a suite of software applications from Media-X that allows his teachers do everything from keeping calendars and making to-do lists to creating lesson plans and assessing students' work. They design their own rubrics, using the 1:4 assessment scale required in Ontario. And McLean has noticed a difference, from the chemistry lab to the playing field.

"A chemistry teacher can be chatting with students about concepts that are taking place in a lab," McLean says. "If during that discussion the student has demonstrated mastery of a particular concept, the teacher can plug in that information right there."

"I can also check competencies as I walk around the lab," notes chemistry teacher Derek Cole. "I mark them off, boom, boom, boom." That instant record keeping translates to more effective meetings with students, he adds. "You can have immediate conferences anywhere with students who ask, 'How am I doing?'"

New Assistant Principal Jill Pensa notes, "In my old school, you had to bring the students to the computer to have that conversation."

Physical education teacher Sean Kelly uses his handheld to assess his students according to rubrics for skills in various sports. He estimates that he saves a hall hour for every skill set he evaluates, compared to the paper and pencil routine he used to go through.

Guidance counselor Anne Parry has to manage a different flood of information and uses the handheld as a day planner and "graffiti" board. "My brain cannot contain all that people throw at me," she explains. "I could be looking for a student in the hall, and a teacher will give me two additional referrals."

Parry also can view photographs downloaded from the student yearbook. "If I hear about a person in trouble emotionally, I would have a name, but now I also have a face," she says.

For his part, Principal McLean makes full use of the Media-X products ePrincipal, a program for analyzing student achievement, and mVal, a tool for evaluating his teaching staff. When McLean observes a class, he looks for 16 teaching competencies spread across five domains--from commitment to students and student learning to teaching practice to professional knowledge.

"By using mVal, I can have all of this information on my handheld, and I would be basically clicking whether the teacher was 'satisfactory,' 'not satisfactory,' 'good,' or 'exemplary," McLean says. He can check off the sources he's using for evidence, such as student notes or teacher lesson plans. The mVal program also stores his pre-conference observations and can download the teacher's self-evaluation for comparison with McLean's view of the situation.

"By comparison," McLean points out, "some of my colleagues in other schools who are less comfortable using the technology, would go in and sit at the back of the classroom in typical fashion with a pad of paper, scribble down notes, then come back to the office at a later time and have to input all the data, sort it all out, and develop the appraisal document. I, on the other hand, come back to my office and synchronize my handheld. And eventually, with the WiFi network, I won't even have to perform a HotSync operation because it will be able to be done wirelessly from any classroom on campus."

McLean estimates that in the past, he's spent 20 to 40 hours, twice a year, for each teacher's evaluation. "It's an incredibly powerful program," he says. "It's made my practice easier, and it's huge timesaver. It cuts my time in half."

Taming attendance

What's currently causing the biggest stir at North Grenville, though, is the immediate prospect of bringing an unwieldy attendance system under control, a transformation that received a boost when a local Internet provider installed a new WiFi network for free.

"I have secretarial staff who are very talented, resourceful people and right now we're wasting talent and resources because we're underutilizing them," says McLean. "One of my staff members sits all day and collects these sheets of paper, and she inputs attendance all day. It's a terrible waste of her talent when a teacher could actually click off attendance on a handheld."

That staff member is Pat Johnston, who every day has to wait on four sets of class attendance sheets from each teacher. "Teachers lose their sheets or hand them in late," she says, adding that it's anybody's guess when she will get an accurate count.

"Sometimes I get the attendance by the end of class, sometimes by noon, sometimes by the end of the day," Johnston says. "If a mother calls at 9 and says, 'Is Johnny there?', I may not be able to answer her. If the teachers have done the attendance on their handhelds, I'll be able to know where the students are right on the spot."

Besides the more accurate and immediate reporting, the new system will free up Johnston to follow up on missing students by calling home and by providing what McLean sees as more useful record keeping.

"As in the United States, we're becoming cognizant of the need for good data and how to turn that data into useful information," he says. He's also looking forward to installing iNotice software from Media-X, which enables users to contact parents by email from anywhere in the building.

"For example," says McLean, "every month, my staff have been making what we call 'good news' phone calls, where you call home and say, 'I caught Johnny being good.' iNotice allows staff to send messages by email right then and there, on the spot."

"It not only lets you record student achievements, you can record other incidents you might not ordinarily record and put them in a central database," adds Media-X's Moretti. "People are more likely to seize the moment because the handheld is so easy to use. What seem like minor incidents can add up, and the product is pretty powerful."

Those contacts are part of Ontario's requirement that teachers get in touch with parents regularly. By using palmOne handhelds, McLean says, the school will better be able to document and correlate these efforts.

All this progress with handhelds has the North Grenville staff imagining the possibilities down the line. "We're all going to be on the same page," predicts Parry. "We're all going to be linked. I think we will have a united front."

"I coach the school basketball team," says physical education teacher Kelly, "and Derek coaches the cross-country team. And there a number of sport management applications for palm0ne handhelds for charting a basketball game, or for keeping times at a cross-country meet, of keeping statistics in volleyball or hockey.

"If we could integrate that software, we could eliminate a lot of paperwork for all of our coaches, and we could give instantaneous feedback at halftime or in between periods or in the middle of a meet on how the athletes are doing. If somehow it were possible financially, it would be another convenience, another efficiency."

Handhelds ahead

In the meantime, other schools in the District have expressed interest in North Grenville's widespread use of handheld Technology. McLean discovered mVal on his own and has since conducted training sessions with other schools. Last year the entire district adopted that application for staff evaluations.

"I always get the questions of, 'How did you do that?'" says McLean. His answer: time, energy, and forging partnerships. "I share with my colleagues because I think that's part of my role as well," he says. "If it's good for North Grenville, chances are it will be good for South Grenville and Brockville Collegiate and other schools in our district."

"That's very elite company in terms of our thinking and embracing of technology," McLean says. He credits his staff, but he also recalls what it was like before he began using his handheld computer almost four years ago. He depended on an appointment book to get him through the school day.

"I was quite a disciple of the old Day-Timer," he says. "It contained my contacts, my appointments, my to-do list. It was the printed version of a handheld. My secretary would make appointments for me. I would be out of the school, and I would make appointments for me. But they would never, ever get into my book.

McLean made a one-week transition to using the handheld. "It was easy, and I stopped carrying my appointment book a week later. I stopped being late for meetings. I'd be driving to wherever I was going, without knowing how to get there, but it was now in the handheld."

McLean and his staff have come much further down the road, with palmOne handhelds as their primary vehicle. "If we're spending less time on the 'administrivia' end of things," he adds, "then there's more time and energy going into teaching and learning and student achievement."

The author is a freelance writer based in Newton, MA.