EDUC630 Week 1 Blog Post

As I think about technology adoption at the independent school that I work in over the 15 years that I have been here I must say that there have always been great intentions.  In 1998 when I got to the school there were 3 computer labs but the teachers did not have their own devices and most of the students only used computers when they came to school.  

Fast forward to 2013 when everyone has some sort of device in their hand that they use almost every waking hour of every day.  Schools have to keep up with this phenomenon and have had to upgrade their networks to accommodate more traffic and the different ways that technology is being used.  Our school is a boarding school so the technology literally is working around the clock, in my early years at the school we had an IT director who did not support our boarding program. He would go home a 5pm and if the network experienced problems in the evenings then he felt that we could wait until morning. Once he was gone and we hired someone who understood how important it is to have 24/7 access to the network.  

Three years ago we changed all of our technology from PC to MAC and now we are about 90% Apple based products.  We still support some PC platforms if students have them but any equipment that is purchased is MAC.  Our teachers have all been issued MacBook Pro laptops and this year we are participating in an iPad program that requires our 8th and 9th grade students to have an iPad. Their books are only on iPad, eBook editions and will probably move toward that for our other 6-12 grade classes as well in an effort to lighten the backpacks of the students.

The jury is still out as to whether or not the iPad is the ultimate solution for producing work for students.  I do not feel that it is a productivity device and writing papers or creating other types of projects using Keynote or Powerpoint can be a challenge using the iPad.  Our class worked on creating a webpage and the editing of the webpage was a challenge on the iPad because many of the Flash type of features that are added to webpages could not be done on the iPad but worked fine on the computer.