A new school year always brings new challenges. Especially with regards to technology. Staying one step ahead of the competition is crucial in an urban setting. The overarching goal of the year we set out to achieve was access. Allowing students to use devices in the classrooms for the first time at St. Saviour High.
Now that we had the infrastructure in place our next step was to run a small test group. I drafted a Use Policy in accordance with the schools mission and engaged the faculty in the process. After a successful test run we extended the test group to the entire senior class beginning in October of 2013. As with any major changes in an institution there was and still is reluctance to adopt the innovation. But I am happy to report that as of 2/1/2014 the entire school has embraced the BYOD project and the results are overwhelmingly positive.
Keeping pace with the rapidly advancing tech world is crucial. This year I began to offer a series of workshops designed to let all students at any grade level explore a technology they were particularly interested in. No quizzes, no test, whatever they are interested in and only during their free time. The workshops are in their infancy but I believe can have a profound impact. We started this year with Photoshop Cs4, Introduction to Programming, Microsoft Excel, and Web Design.
I also launched the school’s first ever Robotics club. We were able to purchase a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit and students have been building and learning how to program robots for the first time in the school’s history.
A generous parent of a future student who works in IT donated a number of servers to us last March. I had a number of issues that I could plug with the addition of this equipment. Active Directory, Backups and a proper Minecraft server among them. First problem was figuring out how to repair a broken array. The servers were from the US government so the virtual drives were destroyed.
Anthony Tricarico 