David McCreath, left, and Mike Fleckenstein work on the Anchorage School district Web site at their office near West Anchorage High School. (Marc Lester / Anchorage Daily News)

By Dawnell Smith
Daily News correspondent

Anchorage students, parents and teachers may not see cutting edge public education online any time soon, but they can augment the traditional classroom with the services and information found on the Anchorage School District’s web site.

"We’re working on making it possible for parents and students to get everything they need from the site,’’ said David McCreaph, a programmer and web site coordinator for ASD.

Though a work in progress, the district’s site can do wonders for improving communication between students, teachers, parents, school board members and the community, he said. But plenty of challenges lie ahead.

Right now, for instance, anyone in the district who wants a web page has to spend several days learning basic web design, then follow up every week with site maintenance. For teachers and other staff, the process takes time out of their already hectic schedule.

Worse yet, "going from a simple to reasonably complex page is an exponential leap" in programming knowledge, McCreaph said.

"One of the big things we're doing is making it easier for everyone in the district to put up a site. We want to make it possible for teachers and students to put up pages just by using forms."

Though ASD was probably one of earliest K-12 education systems in the nation to create a web site in the mid-90s, it relied on the talents and efforts of people who already had full-time jobs. By the time McCreaph started work about a year ago, the site had accumulated outdated information and got virtually no hits. Now it gets 20,000 to 70,000 a week, he said.

With that kind of exposure, McCreaph wants to improve the site by making it easy for teachers to "have a page with homework assignments and possible links to information and things like downloadable reading assignments," he said.

To do that, the district has started migrating from an Apple Macintosh to a better-equipped PC Windows machine as a server.

"We’ve got a lot of work to do, but are light years ahead of a year ago," McCreaph added.

The main web site, www.asd.k12.ak.us, contains school news, school board schedules and minutes, contact numbers, department listings, school links and so forth. Some of the most functional features allow people to check job postings or look at open purchasing bids. Students and parents can also find health examination, sports payment and activity forms that they can download and print.

From there, users can use links to get information on specific schools. Teachers and administrators control content for the school pages. Eventually, he wants to establish a standard design that will help minimize the time required to build and update these pages.

Many of the school links contain news, sports schedules, immunization information, homework assignments, event listings, teacher contact information, maps, weather reports, a bevy of rules and regulations and much more.

McCreaph admits that many of the school pages need work, but he highlighted the Goldenview Middle School page as one of the more advanced. According to Andy Holleman, a computer skills teacher at the school, the site allows any Goldenview teacher to access folders, adjust content and provide links.

Teachers need a bit of knowledge and training to use this sort of open system, so the school provided classes after school and on weekends last year, he said.

Students learn similar skills through computer classes and assignments that require web pages and power point presentations. A few Goldenview students even helped design the school’s main site.

In the coming years, Holleman expects to see even more online activity in schools and throughout the district. For one thing, teachers will post more supplemental material and homework assignments online, which will expand the resources they can use, he said.

"You can’t Xerox 50 pages about rockets with diagrams and pictures for 150 kids every week," he said, "but you can put it online."

When put on a web site, this kind of information also allows parents to get more involved in their children’s curriculum, he added.

More exciting still, students who work on projects using protected folders on the student server at school will eventually gain access to that work wherever they can log on, Holleman said.

Needless to say, the Web has turned into an invaluable tool for many educators. Teachers use it to update parents on homework and various projects, schools use it to update parents, and students use it to research or publish original writing or electronic art, wrote Andy Rabung of the district’s instructional technology department in an e-mail interview.

Other uses include collaborative projects between students and teachers like those sponsored by ThinkQuest, www.thinkquest.org, which encourages students to use the Internet in creating Web-based educational tools and materials, he added.

Another more teacher-focused project by the ASD IT department will use a web site to support reading instruction. The project will let teachers publish collaborative projects, communicate with other teachers around the state, work with Alaskan authors on writing projects, access a calendar and much more, explained Rabung.

The department’s "main objective has always been to help teachers integrate technology into their activities, not create activities for technology," he wrote.

Technology has limitations, of course, and privacy issues will harness its use. When it comes to putting transcripts, grades, report cards and other personal information online, the district will take a good hard look before doing anything.

"The online classrooms and learning, that’s down the road," said McCreaph. "That’s very complex and the biggest issue is security."

©2000 Anchorage Daily News