BY SANDY VAUGHN
TOTAL TECHNOL
How one rural school district has
Total technology immersion doesn’t happen overnight, but with vision and determination, transformation can take hold
and start to grow. Floydada Independent School District (FISD), winner
of the 2010 Sylvia Charp Award for
District Innovation in Technology, is
a great example of what a district can
achieve when starting with a modest tech initiative in a single school.
FISD’s one-to-one project has changed
learning for nearly 900 students in a
rural west Texas school system where
minority students are the majority and
those with low socioeconomic classification make up 85% of the student
population.
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Six years ago, our middle school
became a Texas Technology Immersion Pilot (TIP) school. The purpose
of the TIP program is to help schools
step beyond typical one-to-one initia-tives and completely envelop students
and teachers in technology. From the
beginning, our district administrators
have been planning ways to extend
the TIP concept to our high school
and eventually to the rest of our district. Our vision is that all students
in grades 6–12 have laptops to use
for learning 24 hours a day, seven
days a week.
We have now realized that goal. Our
one-to-one program has students excited about education, and test scores
are up. Students realize that the experience has opened doors to a brighter
future because the district has armed
them with 21st-century technology
skills.
Visionary Leadership
It was important to develop a clear vision for the future of our initiative and
get buy-in at all levels. Our superintendent, Jerry Vaughn, knew that the
TIP program had potential and that
extending it to the high school was
crucial. He and other FISD administrators found a way to fund the one-to-one program with local money,
and the school board approved the
plan in a 7–0 vote.
Floydada High is now headed into
its sixth year, and the initiative is
spreading to our elementary school.
Last fall, FISD opened a renovated
elementary school with two computer
labs and six 20-unit computers on
wheels (COWs) carts available for
classroom checkout in PK– 4. The
school issues each fifth grader a laptop
to use during school hours, and that
may become 24/7 before the end of
the 2010–11 school year.
Teachers were also crucial to our
success. They supported the new initiative, and many even sought out this
change in learning and teaching. Their
use of laptops in day-to-day learning
enhanced the effectiveness of the program more than any other factor. We
also provided teaching assistants with
MacBooks. One aide commented that
having the responsibility of using the
technology made her feel as though
she was an important part of the educational process.
Network Infrastructure and Hardware
An essential component in our success was an infrastructure that could
support wireless access for more than
800 laptops. Each of our school buildings has a wireless network, which
is also crucial for after-hours usage.
Many times, we see students without
home Internet access sitting outside
school buildings using the network
after hours.
Each classroom has its own projector, and all elementary classrooms,
along with a growing number of
middle and high school classrooms,
have interactive whiteboards. Many
also have document cameras, student
response systems, interwrite pads,
USB microscopes, and probeware.
