RTC Communicator for Winter 2019

10 WINTER 2019 A Single Community with One Long Main Street How BAND, EduTech, and local schools work together to prepare North Dakota students for the future The difference? One classroom is in Mexico. Local Meets Global Virtual “pen pal” relationships like this one are being formed in schools across North Dakota. Partner classrooms are often located in states and countries where North Dakota sends natu- ral gas, coal, soybeans, and other exports. By communicating with their “pen pals” through video chat, vlogs, podcasts, and other digital formats, students learn about North Dakota’s econ- omy as well as the economies it impacts around the world. Learning opportunities like these would have been unimaginable two decades ago when Kirsten Baesler served as a Technology Integration Specialist at Bismarck Public Schools. At the time, educators struggled to communicate via dial-up internet with schools across town, let alone in another country. “There were technology deserts that existed building to build- ing, district to district—areas not connected to the internet,” Baesler said. Today, Baesler is in her second term as the State Superintendent of the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction. She oversees the 78 school districts that are operating in 470+ buildings across the state and supports the nearly 120,000 students they serve. Broadband Association of North Dakota Virtual “pen pal” partnerships, as well as countless other educa- tional programs, would not be possible for students—especially in rural areas—without the high-quality, dependable broadband provided by the 18 member organizations that make up the Broad- band Association of North Dakota (BAND). RTC is one of those organizations. In a middle school classroom in rural North Dakota, students crowd around a video camera and wave excit- edly. Waving back at them from the projector screen at the front of the room is another class of students, in another middle school. The two classrooms are all but mirror images of one another: similar laminate desks, similar pre-teen chatter, similar brightly colored posters on the walls.