COURTESY OF ALAN NAKAGAWA Honokaa High School students did some outdoor learning from Kawaihae Harbor in West Hawaii on Friday using a laptop computer to make a wireless link to the Internet.

Wireless ’Net
widens schools’ reach

2 isle teachers are boosting
such signals for use in education

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By Rod Thompson
rthompson@starbulletin.com

WAIMEA, Hawaii >> Like Johnny Appleseed planting apples, teacher and technology whiz Bill Wieking is planting antennas across the state. He has put up 40 so far.

Wieking's purpose is to let students log onto the Internet from beach sands to mountainsides without trailing thousands of feet of cable or telephone wire behind them.

The concept is called "wireless Internet."

Schools aren't the only ones using it. Business people with laptops can use it in airports. Home laptop owners can use it sitting in their back yard.

But Wieking, with 18 years as a teacher and four years doing outreach for the Maui supercomputer, uses it for education.

Normally, a wireless signal will go a few hundred feet.

"What we've done is take this normal technology and, with antennas and amplifiers, we can go up to 26 miles," Wieking said.

A colleague in the effort is 10th-grade science and technology teacher Alan Nakagawa at Honokaa High School, north of Hilo.

ROD THOMPSON / RTHOMPSON@STARBULLETIN.COM Bill Wieking showed the antennas he uses to send and receive data online from his pickup truck.

Nakagawa likes to take his students to the other side of the island to study shoreline ponds. With "probeware," students can stick instruments into the ponds to record temperature, oxygen levels and acidity. With global positioning equipment, the students can mark exact locations along the edge of a pond.

The laptop draws a map of the pond and plots a graph of data.

The information is then sent through the wireless Internet, and students down the coast or back in class on the other side of the island can instantly see it, Nakagawa said.

Students in the classroom can e-mail requests for more information, Wieking said.

Children now "own" the outcome, he said.

He described a similar project in Kalihi years ago -- not wireless, but definitely tech. One boy told him: "I never used to think I could do anything right. Now I'm the first person doing something right."

The boy went on to become an engineer.

"This is a kid who was going to be a gangbanger," Wieking said. "He builds satellites now."

Wieking and Nakagawa also work with the Waimea-based Hawaii Just Think Mobile, one of only three in the nation, funded by Internet businessman Marc Benioff.

They've converted a school bus, installing iMac computers and wireless capability, and Wieking and Nakagawa greatly boosted its range so they can take their wireless computers on the road.

Nakagawa dreams of creating a portable, battery-driven antenna box, so his students can go to remote areas without the bus or an antenna on a friend's roof helping to boost their signals.

The bus and the students at the shore get their Internet links through superfast T-1 lines at Honokaa High and other schools, which buy Internet access.

"Since we are not reselling our services, and our users are all known to us, the ISPs (Internet service providers) have been cooperative," Wieking said. "We are not competing with them, as they really have no plans to market wireless Internet to remote locations yet."