While walking through Best Buy last summer I saw a group of middle school–aged kids excitedly checking out Chromebooks while talking about how they were going to get one when school started.
At the high school, however, this excitement for the Chromebooks—low-cost laptops designed by Google primarily for access to the Internet—seemed to be unanimously evaporated.
ICSD is under a false impression that it is doing a fantastic job using technology in classrooms. While Superintendent Dr. Brown was praised by Seth Peacock, former vice president of the Board of Education, for his “strong professional development plan and seamless curriculum integration” behind his technology initiatives, the majority of teachers use their very expensive Smart Boards—interactive whiteboards with a touch interface—merely as a projector, or don’t use them at all.
Student inquiries have revealed that many teachers feel the incoming technology was forced on them and that most have no real desire to use it. With this in mind, any suspicion felt by students towards more technology spending by the district is certainly understandable.
The iPad and laptop labs never seem to work as intended either. It usually takes 15 minutes for the class to get logged into the laptops, and then when the class tries to use the Internet the network slows to the point of being frozen. The IT department has said the network has been improved over the summer to allow more bandwidth, but will this take care of the problem?
You can’t really blame IHS students for not being excited about Chromebooks, seeing as so far the official ICSD policy towards technology seems to be “If you buy it, they will learn.”
Dr. Brown’s Chromebook program won’t succeed if teachers do not adopt the new technology effectively in their teaching and the school’s network bandwidth is not dramatically increased.