WCTE Taking Part In Statewide Initiative To Broadcast Classroom Content To Home

A new PBS Tennessee initiative coming to three Upper Cumberland school districts that would bridge the digital divide in broadband access.

WCTE Education and Engagement Director Dr. Cephas Ablakwa leads the statewide Datacasting Initiative. Ablakwa said WCTE will use its signal to broadcast classroom content to a device at home.

“Basically just how television comes to our house right? It uses a television signal, but instead of broadcasting a video, it’s broadcasting information,” Ablakwa said. “So anything like a spreadsheet, PDF, video, audio anything that can travel by the internet as long as the teacher makes that available.”

Putnam, Overton and Jackson county schools are all in the process of incorporating the system. Ablakwa said a specific timeline of operation is not known as school systems work on selecting students for the program.

“Our target audience is k-12 students that do not have internet access or broadband access and in the state of Tennessee that is a pretty sizable number. In fact this is a problem across every state in the country,” Ablakwa said. “This was brought more to the forefront more during the pandemic when the student had to stay home then it was quickly realized that there is a digital divide between the ones that do have internet access and the ones that do not have internet access.”

Ablakwa said the State Department of Education as well as other funding partners have made the service free for students. Ablakwa said any device that has internet capabilities will be compatible.

“Datacasting has been around for probably 20 years now,” Ablakwa said. “All it was used for was emergency services, which meant that the fire department, police department, health department used datacasting as a backup. TEMA is one of the organizations that uses it in our state. During the pandemic, we changed it over to bring it to education.”

Ablakwa said students can see everything that a teacher wants to share through a small receiver that would connect to a device. Ablakwa said since datacasting is not true internet, students can not send work back to the classroom.