Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 21, 1995 TAG: 9510230025
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ELISSA MILENKY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The grant, announced on Friday, was awarded to the BEV earlier this month by the U.S. Department of Commerce's telecommunications division to help provide rural communities greater access to the Internet.
The money will be used this way:
Computer equipment will be purchased for Christiansburg High School and Auburn High and Middle School that will provide a link to the Blacksburg Museum of Natural History and the BEV.
A computer lab with up to 15 terminals will be established at Auburn High and Middle School where students, teachers and members of the community will be trained to use the Internet in their daily lives and education.
An 18-month salary for a full-time computer trainer will be provided for the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library.
The BEV will establish an on-line clearinghouse of information to help other communities establish electronic villages.
Approximately $90,000 of the grant money will go toward computer equipment, while the bulk of the funding will be spent on staffing, said BEV Director Andrew Cohill. In addition to the extra library staff member, the BEV will provide a technical support staff member, two Virginia Tech graduate students and Tech faculty members who will oversee the graduate students.
"The goal is to train the trainers," Cohill said Friday. "We can't train every teacher, every librarian in the county ourselves."
The BEV, which is celebrating its two-year anniversary this month, is a joint project with Bell Atlantic Corp., Virginia Tech and Blacksburg. It was formed to determine how a town could interact on the information superhighway as a community and as a test market to determine how to price, package and deliver information via computer.
"With the electronic village well-established in Blacksburg, the time has come to expand its resources beyond its immediate community ... ," Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, said in his announcement Friday.
The money will be used almost immediately. Karen Dillon, director of the library, said the new staff position will be filled in a month, bringing the library system up to three full-time computer trainers. The library, which has been a partner with the BEV for a year and a half, already has trained more than 1,000 people in the community.
"This is like icing on the cake," Dillon said.
Work on the new computer lab at Auburn High and Middle School, which is four miles outside of Christiansburg, will begin in January. The lab will have "everything one would need to work in there and publish pages that would go on the World Wide Web," said Larry W. Arrington, Montgomery County supervisor of technology/management.
The lab will be used during the day by students. A full-scale training program will be held to train teachers how to integrate the Internet into their lesson plans. The public can use the lab after school hours, Arrington said.
Several school officials said they hope the new technology will connect the community, and especially students, to different cultures and ideas. Auburn Principal Bob Miller said the school is in a traditional, rural community.
"A lot of our kids don't travel extensively," said Miller, whose entire school population is about 530 students.
"It opens their eyes a lot and I think makes them more responsible citizens in society," he added.
by CNB