Features Education

On a given afternoon, Brandon Prince and his staff might be out on an athletic field in muddy sneakers setting up a digital tracking system for a track and field meet. On another, you might find them up on ladders installing security cameras or testing electronic door locks. This is in addition to tending to […]

In 1987, just months after becoming Hidalgo Independent School District’s lone computer coordinator, 22-year-old Adrian Garcia surveyed the IT landscape and did what had always felt like second nature: he dreamed of making things better. At a time when 10-megabyte Compaq Desktops were considered state-of-the-art and the internet was still the niche domain of plugged-in […]

Vince Scheivert laughs as he recalls how his early interest in info-tech was partially awakened by him and some high school buddies attempting a computer program to predict the outcome of 1988’s March Madness. The then 15-year-olds thought they were fairly advanced with computers, and by the standards of three decades ago they may well […]

And you thought you had a busy summer. Every summer for the last four years, Tim Klan has led the technology component, as Livonia Public Schools has undertaken not one school building renovation project, but five to six buildings for a total of 23 so far. From a tech perspective, that’s meant installing new everything—servers, […]

While our college experiences are in many ways defined by buildings themselves—the gothic brick and modernist concrete, the teeming dorms and chock-full lecture halls—the technological infrastructures can be equally evocative. Without reliable internet, those memories can be colored quite differently. And not in sunny hues, either. Looking at the modern, arched opening of Ozarks Technical […]

It’s not a revelation that technology is a powerful tool that engages students, but Kristine Bewley has been awed by just how true it is. Now equipped with Chromebooks, students in grades 3 through 12 at Red Clay Consolidated School District are “super involved” in their curriculum; they take initiative, go out and do their […]

In the middle of a lesson on ancient Greece, all 26 of the classroom’s chromebooks begin to buffer, eliciting a string of frustrated sighs. Down the hall, students wait nervously for the next page of their state test to load online, while nearby the teacher struggles to upload the week’s grades into the learning management […]

On a Wednesday morning in mid-September, a car carrying four high-school students pulls into the parking lot of a mall in Chesterfield, Missouri. Within a few minutes, three more cars arrive. There are 10 students in total, mostly juniors and seniors, all eager for the day ahead. Once inside the mall, they thread through the […]

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 […]

It’s the last week in July, and at Pickens Elementary in Pickens, South Carolina, dozens of students are filing off the bus and into the modest brick school. Over the next four hours, instructors will conduct a series of reading lessons via newly issued iPads. Once the day’s learning is done, the buses will return […]