October 30, 2014
Another school using one-to-one technology is in Cedar Rapids at Prairie High School. The school has about 1100 students, grade 10-12; each student is issued a MacBook.
“The computer makes things a lot easier because you have everything you need right with you all the time,” MaeLina Araujo, a Senior at Prairie said. “we need the computers for the majority of our homework; we use it in every single class,”
Like most computers, the devices don’t work as well when there isn’t internet connection which can be a difficulty at the school.
“There’s some areas of the school that Wi-Fi won’t connect to and when that happens we can take notes on a word document but teachers can’t follow their lesson plan,” Katie Hamilton, a senior at Prairie said.
However, the district has many aspects that are used as technology support.
“There are four techs in our department and we’re responsible for just the one to one computers and there’s 1 of us at each school,” Chris Ketchum, the Tech at Prairie, said.
The school also uses a technology called DINO which is a software that monitors students’ computers at school.
“Teachers can see what all their students are doing and also shut their computer down or lock it,” Ryan Fritz the assistant principal at Prairie said.
First the district established a process to initiate the program.
“The year before we started the one to one program we developed a council of people around the district and tested devices. one of the big factors was if the device is a producer of into or a consumer of one, with a MacBook the software suite it comes with allows more production,” Ketchum said.
The initiative was funded by a bond that the school board voted on, and also bought the extended care apple warranty because anything not caused by accidental damaged will be repaired by apple. The way the school handles accidental damage is the school pays for it, there’s nothing out of the student’s pocket unless the damage was intentional abuse. The school also accommodates for the technology support.
“The teachers had built in professional learning days led by digital literacy trainers who had been educated by members of Apple. those trained teachers lead sessions to show how to use the computer the digital literacy trainers are responsible for incorporating technology into lesson plans,” Ketchum said.
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