NEWARK – Educators reviewed the county’s ongoing digital conversion efforts in a presentation to the school board this week.
On Tuesday, Diane Stulz, the school system’s coordinator of digital learning, outlined the progress made with digital devices in recent years. She said that while challenges remained, Worcester County Public Schools had greatly expanded its technology use since the so called digital conversion began.
“I think we’ve done a great job helping our students prepare for the future,” she said.
According to Stulz, since the process began the school system had added Wi-Fi access points to provide coverage to all of its instructional areas as well as administrative areas and the central office. In the past four years, the school system has distributed 1,591 iPads to elementary school students, 3,076 Chromebooks to intermediate and middle school students and 2,142 laptops to high school students. Each teacher also has a device.
She said one of the largest tasks the school system has faced with the digital conversion has been managing all the devices.
“That has really been a challenge,” she said.
To address it, the school system has 13 technology coaches to help teachers with their digital learning products, setup devices and maintain school websites. There are also four technicians and one network administration who focus on maintaining network connectivity, eliminating viruses, and repairing equipment.
“They’re very busy,” Stulz said.
While more technology creates more work for the techs and coaches, it also provides students and teachers with access to variety of different learning resources and opportunities.
“We talk about changing how we teach and how we learn,” she said. “We use digital products to do that.”
The devices provide access to Office 365 and a variety of other programs students can use. Stulz said many teachers even used online textbooks now. Nevertheless, she stressed that technology remained a tool.
“It’s just like a textbook, it’s just like your pen or pencil,” she said. “That’s all it is. It’s only as good as the teacher who’s teaching.”
She added that while there were challenges — things like ensuring student data was protected and keeping up to date with resources—the issues that officials had initially been worried about hadn’t created problems. Lost and stolen devices, for example, have been rare. While there has been some breakage, Stulz said it was less than the school system had been told to expect.
She thanked the school board, the Worcester County Education Foundation, PTAs and the local community for making the school system’s digital conversion possible.
