http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/plan.pdf

In days of yore — say, pre-millenial — parents relied on paper report cards, teacher conferences and honest children to learn how their charges were doing in school.

E-mail and school Web sites have helped, but some school districts are pushing the digital envelope a bit further.

Several local districts — including Galt Union High School, Sacramento City, Folsom Cordova, Natomas and Elk Grove — provide their school communities with online platforms that mimic popular social networking sites.

“It’s a nice tool for parents, because we live in a high-tech world,” said Lori Ried, whose children attend Elk Grove schools, which use a platform called “School Loop.”

School Loop, like its competitors, creates interactive, school-centric Web sites. Think of it as MySpace for the school’s community, offering e-mail, chat and electronic report cards, with homework assignments and test results thrown in. The program updates daily with new posts from teachers and administrators.

More than 200 schools in Utah, California, Massachusetts, Georgia and Kansas participate in School Loop, which launched in fall 2004.

Edline, PowerSchool, Comunicado and InClass are similar software programs.

Natomas Unified’s 12 schools received PowerSchool in 2002. Folsom-Cordova began using Edline in 2005. Elk Grove Unified signed up with School Loop in 2005, Galt Joint Union in 2006 and then Sacramento City in 2007.

At Pleasant Grove High School in Elk Grove last Friday, 10th-grader Dylan Moffat called School Loop “a double-edged sword,” as he took a break from his fourth-period class in study skills.

“You can check your grades,” said Dylan, “but the bad part is (your) parents can see your grades, too.”

Beyond grades, kids can no longer fib about having homework. Now, parents know better.

John Stayton is one such parent. As a registered School Loop user, he receives a daily e-mail with daughter Amanda’s current grades and assignments.

Amanda, 15, attends Franklin High, one of the 13 Elk Grove Unified schools using School Loop.

“I constantly have an understanding of her progress,” Stayton said.

Nancey Bartow has a 14-year-old, Sean, at Katherine L. Albiani Middle School, and a 16-year-old, Alison, at Pleasant Grove, the first Elk Grove “School Loop” school.

Bartow said the program “has been a real life-saver” for her son, who’s not a good note-taker. He can access the notes and digital presentations his teachers post.

With Alison on the cusp of college, Bartow said she uses School Loop “to know what’s coming up in (Alison’s) schedule in order to monitor her stress … and keep her focused.”

Pleasant Grove Vice Principal Ed van Brenk said the School Loop site has had 815,000 “hits,” or page views, since August.

“We know parents like it,” he said.

Pleasant Grove 10th-grader Anthony Huntoon is a fan, for the most part.

“If I don’t pay attention in class, I can check School Loop later,” said Anthony, who takes the study skills class with Dylan Moffat. “The bad part is some teachers don’t post homework or keep grades up to date.”

At about $30,000 per school per year, the popular program is not cheap.

At the Oct. 2 Elk Grove school board meeting, members debated whether School Loop should be mandated and funded for all schools.

Each of the 13 schools that uses the program pays for it out of the campus budget.

Board members Brian Myers and Jeannette Amavisca said they wanted to mandate the program and prioritize it in the coming school budget.

But others have questions. What if the fee goes up? And what about the “digital divide”? Not every household has a computer.

Board president Pollyanna Cooper-LeVangie said she preferred to offer the program to schools that ask for it rather than mandating it at sites that may not fully use it.

The district signed a three-year contract with School Loop, at an annual fee of $2.50 per student. However, the program’s CEO and founder, Mark Gross, said Monday that new districts are paying $4.25 per student per year.

Milton Chen, the executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which documents and disseminates information about technology and education, said it’s high time schools invest in technology.

But he also said this country’s “digital divide” should be of “great concern to school boards, policymakers and state legislators.”

The use of programs such as School Loop should be looked at “very seriously to make sure that while some schools move ahead, others are not being left behind.”

“If some students and families have access and others do not, there’s no level playing field.”

The U.S. risks falling behind other countries in technology innovation unless the next president works to shore up education, loosen immigration policy and bolster spending in R&D and broadband.

That was the consensus of leaders who gathered Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley, campus to discuss the future of the U.S. tech industry in light of growing competition overseas.

“The U.S. has a huge advantage: venture capital, the world’s best universities and engineers who exchange information,” said Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) CSCO CEO John Chambers. “If we don’t act quickly, we could lose that lead.”

The panel also included John Chen, chief executive of database maker Sybase (NYSE:SY) SY, and Laura Tyson, a professor at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business and Public Policy Group and once the top economic adviser to President Clinton.

With the Iraq War, terrorism and health care dominating the race for the presidency, the trio said they fear politicians are paying too little attention to bedrock economic issues that hinge on U.S. competitiveness and innovation.

Increasing productivity growth by just a few percentage points, Chambers said, would create new jobs and boost middle-class incomes without fueling inflation.

Panelists also pointed out it will take innovation to end our reliance on foreign-produced and greenhouse-gas emitting energy.

Innovation starts with education, Tyson said. Too many students are dropping out of school, and too few are studying math and science.

“The first thing when they graduate, we want them to leave,” he said.

All three panelists called for an immigration policy that makes it easier for foreign workers to get jobs with U.S. companies.

Whoever wins the 2008 presidential election will have to quell what seems to be a rising wave of protectionism, Chen said. The sentiment is apparent in voters who want tighter immigration controls and others worried about the effect of outsourcing and foreign competition.

It’s not just here. Chen noted that China limits outside investment and imposes its own, sometimes incompatible, technology standards.

Still, all countries recognize the opportunities in tech innovation, Chambers said. “Boundaries and borders will come down,” he said. “It’s a trend no one can stop.”

Much of the Berkeley event centered around energy innovation, which participants called key to national security, economic growth and environmental health.

“We need a wave of innovation around energy” on the same magnitude of recent advances in information technology, Tyson said.

John Doerr, a partner at the Silicon Valley investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, put it more strongly, in another panel discussion. He called the issue “more important than the Internet.”

He said the push will dwarf even the massive national efforts to build the first atomic bomb and launch the Apollo space missions. “This is about changing the energy infrastructure of the planet,” Doerr said.

Short of an E=MC 2-level energy breakthrough, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA) JAVA CEO Jonathan Schwartz asked companies to make better use of resources. Many Sun employees work from home via the Internet.

The company stopped printing its annual report in favor of electronic copies. That alone saves Sun $1 million a year, Schwartz says.

“It isn’t about hugging trees,” he said. “It’s about hugging the balance sheet and shareholders.”

Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google’s GOOG nonprofit arm Google.org, said he’s worried that energy and climate-change issues haven’t become more mainstream, but is encouraged by recent trends, including rising investments in alternative energies. “Let’s find a way to convert this crisis into an opportunity,” he said. “I’m more optimistic than I was before.”

A project by the commission called “e-eskwela” (electronic school) aims to digitize the entire high school curriculum as an alternative to taking it in the normal classroom setting.

The project involves a partnership between the CICT and the Bureau of Alternative Learning Systems (formerly the Bureau of Non-Formal Education), which is under the Department of Education or DepEd.

Of the total 80 modules (20 for each year of high school), around 40 have been digitized and made available online, said CICT commissioner Tim Diaz de Rivera.

The CICT has piloted the online modules in four designated e-learning centers, located in Roces Avenue in Quezon City, San Jose, Bulacan, Mandaue City in Cebu and Cagayan De Oro City.

These centers are located in public schools or designated Telof (Telecommunications Office) government calling offices.

“The e-learning modules are ideally targeted at high school drop-outs or out-of-school youths who wish to finish and get a high school diploma, especially those who feel they are too old to go to school,” Diaz de Rivera said in a phone interview.

The e-eskwela project is part of a larger ICT for Basic Education project that attempts to develop e-learning components for primary and secondary public school education.

ICT for Basic Education, a priority project mandated by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, also covers providing computers to public high schools. The entire project receives around P400 million in funding each year.

The study “Are students ready for a technology-rich world?” provides the first internationally comparative data in this area, based on OECD’s PISA 2003 assessment of educational performance by 15-year olds. It backs up previous OECD analysis about the importance of computers in schools.

Drawing on data from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Are Students Ready for a Technology-Rich World? What PISA Studies Tell Us, examines:

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Whether access to computers for students is equitable across countries and student groups;
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How students use ICT and what their attitudes are towards ICT;
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The relationship between students’ access to and use of ICT and their performance in PISA 2003;
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The implications for educational policy.

What kinds of policies exist to encourage schools’ use of internet as a tool of education?

Do advanced countries and developing countries have different policies for internet?
Is there a certain pattern for such policies?