Wednesday, October 22, 2014

What's New for the 2014/15 School Year?

This year brings the addition of 150-180 new Chromebooks to each school.  Not only do these additions greatly improve our student to computer ratio, but more importantly they allow our teachers to create a more student-centered 21st century classroom environment where they can develop students higher order thinking skills, communication skills and collaboration skills utilizing technology they will find in the 21st century workplace. In order to ensure our students, faculty and technology perform to their potential, we made several other improvements.  We offered professional development on a number of Google apps throughout the Fall with more planned for the remainder of the school year.  We doubled the bandwidth to the Internet at each school, elevating each school's broadband speed to 150 Mb/s.  We installed a new application aware 802.11ac wireless network and began upgrading the supporting wired infrastructure.  We added two part-time technology coaches at our Jr./Sr. high complex to assist our staff with technology integration and further develop their skills.  They will continue to build upon the skills already learned from our outstanding K-6 Google Certified Teacher, Caren MacConnell, who attended the exclusive Google Teacher Academy at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California this summer.

The Chromebooks will serve double duty as they will also help provide a sufficient number of testing devices for this Spring's PARCC assessments.

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