VICENZA, Italy - DoDDS-Europe director Dr. Nancy Bresell visited Vicenza last week for meetings with school principals and labor union representatives.
Packing an iPad and a laptop in her travel gear, Bresell participated in instructional leadership training for all 18 principals in the Mediterranean District (which includes all three Vicenza community schools), joint training with labor union representatives and a meeting with the head of the labor organization.
"The Vicenza community is a great place. I can tell you that our teachers love it here. You have really good students, really good children. You've got a command structure that's devoted to making things good for families. I think they're doing a fantastic job," she said.
Top items on Bresell's educational agenda for the current school year are the Department of Defense Education Activity-wide adoption of Common Core State Standards, training teachers with the necessary skills sets to set the pace for the 21st-century classroom and building a 100 percent wireless teaching environment for students, she said.
"Probably the number one initiative in our system is the adoption of the Common Core State Standards," said Bresell. CCSS is a set of educational standards for language arts and mathematics instruction that have been adopted by 45 states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and DoDEA.
"We are in the process now of looking at our current standards for those subject areas and comparing them to the Common Core standards, and then seeing what we have to do differently," she said.
The major differences with DoDEA's current standards are not so much with content, but rather with synthesizing and applying them across the curriculum, Bresell said. DoDDS-Europe will probably roll the program out on a pilot basis during the 2013-2014 school year.
"It's going to be a little bit different," she said. "This year is a year of awareness, so next school year we may roll it out in certain areas or we may begin system-wide," she said.
"The advantage for our military kids is that if they're going to one of these 45 states, at least the parents will know what to expect because they will see the same curriculum standards," said Bresell.
Her second main focus is on ensuring that DoDDS teachers have the requisite set of skills to prepare students to meet the challenges of the digitally connected 21st century.
"We're already using a lot of the strategies, but we want to do some professional development for our teachers. We are building new schools to 21st-century design standards. Here, Vicenza High School will be one," she said.
DoDDS-Europe is evaluating its present infrastructure with an eye toward making the necessary changes to configure the digital learning environment.
"We started at a very basic level with eight high schools, giving all of their students their own laptop computers and it was pretty successful," Bresell said.
While students may clamor for iPads of their own, they are receiving laptops, she said.
"For our purposes right now, the laptop is the better vehicle. We can load textbooks on it, the kids can actually do a lot of work on it. I mean, programs that you can't get on the iPad that our students use in school," Bresell said.
To that end DoDDS-Europe has already increased bandwidth across all its schools in Europe, she said.
"That was huge. We have our own Internet service provider. And we purchased the increased bandwidth and then went about doing the things that had to be done to get it in place," said Bresell.
A second major infrastructure goal is to have all schools wirelessly connected by the end of the current calendar year. Vicenza Elementary and Middle Schools, opened for the 2011-2012 school year, are already 100 percent wireless.
"Even Vicenza High School was almost wireless. That's how they got the laptops last year, because we'd already started the wireless install and they were at 50 percent," she said.
The digital classroom connects students and teachers with rich educational resources, said Bresell, while noting that teachers and schools are engaged in a delicate balancing act in terms of overseeing appropriate Internet use at school while refraining from policing students' online behavior in their private lives.
"We wouldn't have the ability to, but certainly when things come to our attention, most likely school-level attention, then they deal with it," said Bresell. "But then you are on a line here, the same with other activities kids do outside of school, that have no connection to school."
Educators realize that parents in any given community possess different degrees of familiarity with the online world, but are willing to help parents exercise the oversight and control that young people need, she said.
"It varies greatly. My advice would be if you are a parent: you have to make yourself aware. Your kid can't be on the computer and tell you that you can't see what he's doing," Bresell said.
It's the responsibility of both parents and teachers, as the adults in charge, to monitor children and to teach them the proper use of the Internet and cyberspace, not in a punitive way, but in a teaching and proactive way that alerts youngsters to the dangers "out there."
"And there are dangers, even if it's just dangers of influence," she said.
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