Features Region: Southeast

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 […]

In Florida, end-of-year grades can be just as nerve-wracking for schools as they are for the students. Each spring, districts throughout the state are given an accountability report, complete with letter grades for every school. Available to the public, these reports can make or break a system’s reputation—and future funding. So when Joe Amato arrived […]

As her teacher conducts the day’s lesson, a student sits in rapt attention, brand new tablet in hand. Hearing a question she knows the answer to, the student’s hand darts up, eliciting the teacher’s go-ahead. When the hour runs out, it’s on to the next class. Only, she won’t be walking down the high school […]

In most school districts, in order for any new technology plan to achieve true success, the student experience—what they learn in the classroom and how they’re taught to engage with the world beyond—must be paramount. At its core, the initiative being undertaken at North Carolina’s Alamance-Burlington School System (ABSS) is really no different. The approach, […]

Once a week beginning around 6 a.m., scales, chord progressions and simple ditties emanate from one of the music rooms at White Oak High School in Jacksonville, North Carolina. As Onslow County School District has a robust music program, this is to be expected. What isn’t expected, though, is that local students aren’t creating that […]

There are times when hope for a better tomorrow seems to abound as Marlo Gaddis observes what even the youngest students can create with technology in the public schools of Wake County in the middle of North Carolina. For example, during this past academic year Gaddis, the district’s interim chief technology officer since November, watched […]

When the 12,000 students who attend the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) returned to school this August, the buildings and classrooms were largely unchanged, save for a few, mostly minor renovations. The window-laden Student Services Center still shimmered in the sun, while across the street people sauntered and splayed around the leafy park—just […]

A man who acknowledges he bores easily wouldn’t seem likely to stay with the same employer for 17 years, but Steven R. Ferguson has never lacked for motivation in the many info-tech roles he has held at the Technical College System of Georgia. “It’s an ever-changing field,” the energetic and engaging Ferguson tells Toggle while […]

What a difference a few years makes, John Daane had to be thinking on the last Thursday in June, when the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority’s five-member board very routinely OK’d his request to replace its Enterprise Resource Planning software. “I expected some questions and further discussion,” mused the Dutch-born, info-tech director of the local government […]