BERLIN – This fall’s freshmen will be the first students to benefit from the digital conversion planned for Worcester County public schools.
Members of the Worcester County Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday to spend $570,000 from the current year’s budget to purchase laptops for incoming ninth-graders and begin outfitting elementary and middle schools with digital devices.
The decision comes after school system officials spent months evaluating different technology options and surveying students.
“We wanted to make sure the devices we had were ones students felt comfortable with,” said John Quinn, the school system’s chief academic officer.
Quinn said groups of students, technology coaches and teachers were tasked with evaluating various devices. After actually using the devices, they filled out a survey rating the characteristics of each.
School system officials eventually decided to purchase iPads for students in kindergarten through third-grade, Dell Chromebooks for students in fourth- through eighth-grade and Dell laptops for high school students. Quinn said touch screen devices like iPads were ideal for early learners in elementary school, proven by the success of the grant-funded tablets that were already in place in some local elementary schools. Quinn said that when older students, those in middle and high school, were surveyed, they all preferred laptops.
“They wanted a keyboard,” he said.
Quinn said durability was also a concern. Although the middle school students won’t be bringing their Chromebooks home, the high school students will be. Once the ninth-graders are assigned a computer, that device will be theirs to use in and out of school for the next four years. Quinn said insurance options, to cover the cost of repairs or lost devices, were currently being investigated.
Quinn added that he didn’t see the multiple types of devices being a problem.
“We feel comfortable we’ll be able to support all three platforms,” he said.
While all of the county’s ninth-graders will be getting laptops in the fall, the school system is just beginning to purchase digital devices for the other students.
“Our goal is to ensure that every school has at least one cart of devices available to them at each grade level,” Quinn said. “These carts will be shared among teams of teachers. Some schools and/or grade levels may have more than one cart available depending on previous purchases.”