Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Tech Citizenship

Boston Renaissance School taps tech partners; EMC helps fight hunger

By Rodney H. Brown

Boston Renaissance School taps tech partners

When the Boston Renaissance Charter Public School moved into its new facility in Hyde Park last summer, it had the opportunity to upgrade its technology, and the school reached out to corporate, academic and government partners to do so.

According to Lisa Radden, director of instructional technology at the Renaissance School, not only did that work include network upgrades and new computers for the administration, but more importantly, new technology for the classrooms and the students.

When Radden joined the school three years ago, she said technology was not a priority because the administration was more concerned with recruiting great teachers than upgrading the Apple Inc. Macs that had been there since shortly after the school was founded in 1995. 

Now, under Radden’s guidance, the school not only has a handful of computers for each classroom, it has integrated technology into the curriculum. Working with Tufts University and LEGO, the K-6 school last month kicked off a robotics program for bringing literacy to students, based on the Mars NXT Rover. Working with the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has allowed the school’s 6th graders to study optical engineering with the goal of creating their own 3-D glasses.

Radden says partners, particularly academic ones, are vital in keeping the students and the teachers up to date on modern technology. “With technology changing so much you are going to need to have a network of high tech businesses and universities that are going to keep you abreast of what is coming up,” she said.

One partner is MIT, which is working with Verizon to bring mobile learning to the school. With funding from the National Science Foundation, MIT created a program that uses HTC Droid Incredible phones donated by the Verizon Foundation in an after school Renaissance program called CSI, or Community Science Investigator. Students will use the phones to identify a need in the community and develop an augmented reality game to help address that need.

Radden said that, as valuable as those academic partnerships are, they are periodic and short-lived since they are contingent on the university getting grants.

“When you are looking at universities, for example, there are a lot of research programs that are very eager to work with schools, but a lot of that is grant-based,” she said. That has helped her start looking at deeper partnerships with corporate supporters.

“I think it is something that I have learned to refocus on this year,” Radden said. “The last two years have been so much about getting us here to this point.”

Along those lines, Radden is planning on holding the schools’ first-ever annual STEM (science, technology, education and math) Fair in June. Corporate partners have stepped up to the plate with donated prizes, including Copley Group, which is the school’s tech support firm, and ProAV Systems of Westford, which has supplied the school with audio visual equipment.

EMC gives time, 30,000 pounds of food to fight hunger

Throughout the week of March 1, 2011, more than 225 EMC Corp. marketing and communication employees, including Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton, donated their time to work half-day shifts, sorting more than 30,000 pounds of food items it donated to The Greater Boston Food Bank as part of a pledge to fight hunger globally.

In addition to the Massachusetts efforts, the EMC Fights Hunger campaign runs in EMC offices around the world.

In California, EMC employees volunteer in collaboration with local schools to develop and teach a Healthy Nutrition curriculum. More than 200 children are learning from EMC volunteers about the long term impact of food choices, as well as the benefits of local and organic food choices for the environment, sustainability and healthy living.

In China, more than 100 EMC employees volunteered with a local rehabilitation center hosting baking workshops for handicapped individuals. The program, which benefited over 500 people, was able to distribute the food prepared in the workshops to individuals in need in the community.

EMC Fights Hunger launched in January, with a goal of positively affecting 10,000 people around the world. In Massachusetts, the goal was to assemble 2,500 pasta dinners, or 20,000 pounds of food, for families in the Greater Boston area.