Southwest Virginia Governor’s School Teams Up With Sun and URLabs to Put Students Online

John Wenrich
Network Director
Southwest Virginia Governor’s School for Science

The Southwest Virginia Governor’s School for Science, Mathematics and Technology (SWVGS) is one of eight schools established by the Governor of Virginia to create special educational opportunities for students with aptitude and interest in science and mathematics. Established in 1990, the school utilizes the combined resources of the eight participating rural school divisions to provide programs which facilitate the acquisition of scientific and technical knowledge through laboratory investigation and research.

Each year, approximately 100 of the top 11th and 12th grade students from the area attend SWVGS to take science, math, and research classes. The students not only earn credit necessary for graduation from high school, but they also accrue credit towards college. Additionally, students take away knowledge they have gained through texts, lectures, and labs, as well as the invaluable wisdom acquired through "real world" experiences, including presentations by visiting scientists, internships, various field research experiences and collaborative and research projects carried out over the Internet.

Computer hardware from Sun Microsystems and Content Management software from Unified Research Laboratories, Inc. (URLabs) help bring the vast resources of the Internet to SWVGS and its neighboring communities in one easy-to-use package. With the Internet connection model it has developed, SWVGS provides Internet access to its own students and faculty, and it also serves as an Internet provider for school systems and local governments in the New River Valley area of Virginia. Currently, five school divisions - with a total of thirty individual school buildings - are online through SWVGS, with plans for more connections to be established in the future.

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Outdated Resources

The school district, like many others, believed bringing the Internet into the classrooms at SWVGS and at its other schools would broaden its students experiences. The district decided to tackle the technical aspects of providing access to as many students as possible, without stretching its budget too far.

When John Wenrich, the Network Director for SWVGS, began looking at how best to provide Internet access for his school and the district in general, he became aware of an Internet access model developed at NASA Langley that transforms one access site into a regional Internet service provider. The model appealed to Wenrich and the district because, while establishing an Internet connection to the main SWVGS site was relatively straight-forward, extending that access to the eight school systems it worked with was potentially complicated. Seven different telephone companies served the eight school systems, so crossing from one company’s area to another’s greatly escalated the cost of connecting all the sites via LAN lines.

How much of the Internet to expose students to also posed a challenging question to SWVGS and district administrators. Therefore, in addition to trying to decide how they could hook up their schools, they had to choose one software package that was easy enough for everyone to use, yet could provide filtering capabilities and site blocking. Filtering, or content control, was especially important to SWVGS and the district, to keep potentially objectionable or profane material off-limits to students.

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Plugged In With SUN and URLabs I-Gear

At most sites, students have access to computers with Internet connections throughout the day, as the “typical” building has two or three computers in each classroom and two or three labs open for teachers and students.

SWVGS chose URLabs’ Eclipse Internet Gateway product that integrates URLabs’ I-Gear Content Management software with Sun Microsystems servers and other third party hardware and software products as its turn-key Internet web server, email server, and custom filtering software solution. I-Gear is specially programmed to filter sites known in advance to be inappropriate for young audiences, and updates to this feature are sent on a weekly subscription-style basis to keep the software constantly up-to-date.

Additionally, Eclipse allows teachers at SWVGS and its related schools the security to create different filters for different grade levels, and to filter and un-filter individually as students come across sites they need access to. For instance, the I-Guard component of I-Gear employs a series of "agents" that, when working together, provide a solution to content control unmatched in the industry. These agents are small software applications that are customizable by site and are responsible for scanning and analyzing all incoming traffic from the Internet.

"I-Gear’s Dynamic Document Review’s (DDR) context sensitive evaluation can distinguish between the sites describing chicken breasts, breast cancer, and explicit sites containing the word breast," said Wenrich. "While a student is online, the technology works in real-time to filter objectionable material. For example, DDR would allow the links about chicken breast and breast cancer but would block the site with explicit content. Such built in, on-the-fly monitoring helps us assure parents and teachers that the Internet remains an educational rather than a recreational tool."

The Eclipse Internet Gateway also helps SWVGS handle "roaming" users, who use different client computers on their networks during the course of the day. By assigning each student and faculty member a unique password, the I-Gear software allows each user to have access to personalized history and bookmarks from any computer on the network. This password can be the same password used to gain access to both email and personal files on the server.

To run the Eclipse package, SWVGS chose UNIX computers from Sun for their reliability and low maintenance costs. Currently, the entire system runs on nine Sun systems - four Sun SPARCstation 4s, and five SPARCstation 5s, one located at each of the buildings connected to the network - plus Sun monitors, keyboards, hard drives, and a tape backup system from Sun. Student access to the network is through a range of Apple Macintosh computers and IBM-compatible PCs.

"Because I can’t be at every site at all times, I’ve trained the teachers to be site administrators," said Wenrich. "Thanks to the ease of use of both the Sun hardware and Eclipse Internet Gateway, I’ve been able to train non-technical people to monitor activity, control content, and maintain system performance at their sites. I get very few calls from people who can’t handle problems themselves."

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Helping Others to a Brighter Future

"The Sun systems were easy to set up and can handle our wireless connections well. Without the sort of connections we’ve established, we would have been limited to modem access at our district sites, thus limiting the number of students and faculty who could have used the system at one time," said Wenrich.

Now, the system can handle up to 250 simultaneous connections at each school, bringing the Internet to all students at a school at one time, and putting whole labs online. Furthermore, SWVGS absorbs all connection charges for the schools it serves, so teachers and administrators don’t have to worry about online time and other charges.

The Sun/URLabs solution speeds internet connections for all SWVGS’s sites by caching information as students view it on the web. If a student requests a specific URL, the system first checks its cache to see if that URL has been previously loaded. It then goes out to see if the page has been updated. If not, students work with a locally-cached web page, keeping Internet traffic to aminimum and extending the bandwidth of the connection.

"Sun and URLabs proved to be a powerful solution for all our school sites," said Wenrich. "I-Gear makes it possible for us to harness the power of corporate computing in a package that is cost-effective for the K-12 education environment. Combined with the performance of Sun’s computing platforms and the Solaris (TM) operating environment, Eclipse was the only turnkey solution that met our needs completely."

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Easy Internet Administration

"In the near future, we hope to use the model we’ve built to expand Internet access to all eight school systems in our area," added Wenrich. "Already the Internet has become a great resource for our students, as they use it to communicate with each other and with their teachers and to access valuable materials and learning resources around the world."

To fully utilize its Internet connection capabilities and the expertise it has accumulated, SWVGS also provides Web Site homepage development and hosting for a variety of sites, including the schools it has connected, the Columbia Pulaski Community Hospital, the Towns of Dublin and Pearisburg, Virginia, and the Pulaski County Internet Connection. SWVGS’s own web site address is http://www.swvgs.k12.va.us.

"From access to email, research, and worldwide resources, the Sun/URLabs solution has proven invaluable in helping us integrate the Internet into our classrooms," says Wenrich. "The biggest reward, however, is that this technology is helping us push our level of education forward as our students enter a new millennium."

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©1997 Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, SunA™, Ultra Enterprise, and Solaris™ operating environment, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other contries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. Product features/specifications subject to change. without notice.

Last updated on: March 16, 1998