WHAT IS THE INDIANA ACCESS PROGRAM?

Indiana ACCESS is an exciting new way of looking at classroom computing. It is founded on an fiscal model that makes sense for schools and provides access to technology for students.  More about the details in a moment.  Let's first look at the background.

BACKGROUND

After studying the problem and talking to many  teachers, administrators and technology staff, it became clear that the main culprit was the clock on the wall.  Much simpler than the issues surrounding time zones and daylight saving time, there simply wasn't enough time in a day to schedule classes into labs when it was needed.  Labs were being heavily used during the requested times.  Add to that the time lost in herding students to the lab, and then back to the classroom, in some cases students received as little s 35 minutes per week using a computer in school.  While most classrooms were equipped with a few computers - some up to five or six - classroom management and equity issues kept these from being used as an integral part of the curriculum.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Three solutions presented themselves.  1) Give every student a laptop; 2) Add more labs; or 3) Put a computer in the classroom for every student.  Providing every student a laptop seemed like a great idea, but coming up with the funding for such a venture would be costly.  Given Indiana's economic situation, laptop  computers did not seem viable for wide deployment at current prices. Option 2, Adding more labs meant increased shuffling of students and finding adequate space in already crowded schools to create computer labs.  Putting computers in the classrooms, so that teachers could make them an integral part of daily instruction meant finding some new approaches that were affordable and sustainable.

NEW APPROACH

Three (3) years ago, the Department of Education and a few pioneering schools embarked on a novel approach for one-to-one computing in the classroom.  Using small grants from the Department of Education, schools purchased low-cost computers and monitors.  The computers used cost $199 each and the monitors were $99.  Part of the overall plan to keep costs low was to see if schools could successfully use open source software.  Open source software is generally available for free or at low cost.  We wanted to look at functionality of the hardware and software, retraining issues, and viability in the classroom.  The viability in the classroom issue took into consideration several issues like acceptance on the part of students and teachers, comfort levels with application software, reliability and durability.

A year later, it was clear that he concept worked.  The hardware was reliable and teachers were using the systems.  What started as a small program to test commodity-priced hardware and open systems has now swelled to a network of computers that reaches over 18,000 students each day.  InACCESS was born.

Indiana ACCESS is continuing to expand into more classrooms and new master images are constantly being created with tweaks and additions of new application packages.  Schools outside the pilot group are now picking up on the concept and beginning to install classrooms with low-cost computers and Linux throughout the state.