Features Education

At The School District of University City, entrepreneurial middle schoolers have built apps to tackle issues around foster care, stress release and healthy eating—then presented them in biz expo-like fashion via tablets to discerning judges. High school coders, for their part, have reimagined St. Louis’ famed gateway arch: What if it were made from copper […]

Think about it: How long has it been since you last looked at your phone or other handheld device—or are you reading these very words on it? Do you think you could go 5 minutes? Fifteen minutes? A half-hour without checking your notifications or pinging a friend? With technology comes responsibility, and it’s a hard […]

When Roger Brunelle arrived at Naperville Community Unit School District 203 (NCUSD) in 2010, after a successful run in the private sector, many in the district weren’t sure what to expect. For some, the assumption was that the new CIO would test the waters of change cautiously, one toe at a time. Instead, Brunelle went […]

It’s early June, and in hundreds of high-school classrooms throughout Georgia’s Bibb County School District (BCSD), students are rapidly tapping and scrolling on their laptops. An air of focus fills the room, so quiet you can practically hear the hands of the clock. To an observer, the attendant task seems like a standard class assignment—a […]

Sometimes all it takes is one pesky squirrel. No, really—Clear Creek Independent School District has had entire networks taken out as a result of the relentlessly gnawing varmints. But it’s not just rodents that can be perilous: It could be a storm, a construction project, a fender bender—anything. “All it takes is one line being […]

On-time and under budget—what’s that, you say? It’s a concept that can be rare in the private sector; even more so in the public realm. And ultimately, it’s just one of the ways Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) is differentiating itself when it comes to IT. Under the direction of CIO Rod Houpe, the Ohio […]

Now, more than ever, it’s the consumers who are in control, reviewing everything from restaurants to movies to mortgages, through services like Yelp and Google Reviews. Ask Pima Community College (PCC) CIO Raj Murthy, and he’ll tell you education ought to be no different. “Students should never be stuck with a course they don’t understand […]

Most adults were educated from grade school through college in traditional classrooms, which almost always included rows of desks and a large blackboard stretching across one wall. Although this is the way lessons and lectures have been given for two centuries, give or take, many recent studies suggest it is the wrong approach. According to […]

Having guiding principles is key to achieving goals—and Robert Heinrich follows an established, tried-and-true set of them. On a daily basis, the chief information officer at Stockton University stresses what he says are the four crucial values: service excellence, reliability, innovation and security. Those values become ever more essential with each passing day, he says, […]

A strong network of technological solutions is a vital part of any organization, especially one with 40,000 students to track. In his role as chief information officer for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD), Rod Houpe is in charge of coordinating information services for the state’s second largest K-12 school system and the nation’s most […]