One incentive for Highland ISD’s 1:1 program was to help students adjust to the fact that the state (TAKS) assessments were moving online. But Kimberly Gray of the Sweetwater identifies additional benefits, such as full encyclopedias downloaded to the computers, digital textbooks and connections to Smart Boards:

The fourth grade students use their palm pilots and a keyboard for writing, science and social studies. Full encyclopedias have also been downloaded to them for the students’ use. The seventh grade students use their laptops all day long in all of their classes.

The seventh grade teachers were trained over the summer on how to implement the laptops into their classrooms, and those teachers were also given laptops of their own as well as data projectors.

Elementary principal Donna Stewart said the change has been easy for the students because “what may take an adult two days to learn in the technology field, it takes a students two hours to learn.”

It has been more of a challenge to the teachers to change to a digital mode of teaching, but they are doing it and learning to see its advantages.

Parents were also taken through some training so they would know what is expected of them and their children while having these computers and palm pilots in their possession.

The Highland administration hopes to have laptops in the hands of all students in grades 7-12 in the next few years, rolling out to seventh graders each year.

Source : Sweetwater Reporter, Highland School is going more high-tech