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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (43701)	6/7/2001 11:46:52 AM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Sun Hopes to Add Amendment to Education Bill By Margret Johnston - IDG WASHINGTON — Sun Microsystems on Wednesday expressed support for an amendment geared toward pushing technology into classrooms that is expected to be considered this week when the Senate begins debating an education reform bill. ADVERTISEMENT The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, encourages school districts to develop plans to integrate technology and computer systems with teacher training and curriculum development. Schools would be able to tap into $1 billion allocated in the legislation to come up with their integration plans. The idea is that schools will establish models of technology integration that can then be listed as best practices, said Blair Lyman, director of public policy for the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA). The amendment calls for schools and technology professionals to report to Congress in three years on those best practices with the idea of widely implementing them in schools across the U.S. Sun, along with the CCIA, has been working to add language to the education bill that would do more than just "encourage" districts to develop plans to implement technology, but it had to settle for the amendment that Cantwell, Enzi and Harkin put forward, Blair said. "We wanted to get language in there that wasn't going to just die in the conference committee," Blair said during a roundtable discussion Wednesday hosted by the CCIA and Sun. "We'd rather have this than nothing." The CCIA issued a report in May suggesting that schools' technology integration plans incorporate network computing, a model that for years Sun has advocated businesses adopt. The network computing model would simplify the management of the servers at a central location, sparing teachers the need to become systems administrators in order to increase the use of technology in their classrooms, Sun and CCIA officials said. Centralizing software on large servers, which could be located on the school campus or elsewhere within the school district, and relying on open software would mean students could use whatever end device they chose — a Macintosh, PCs or thin clients, for example — to access content, said Kim Jones, VP of global education and research at Sun. "This kind of model can go a long way toward narrowing the digital divide," Jones said. The amendment is expected to be taken up by the Senate on Thursday, when floor debate of the education reform bill begins. biz.yahoo.com