Report recommends changes to school board's technology use

The Sudbury Catholic District School Board is looking at improving how it uses technology in the classroom.

It commissioned IBM Canada's K-12 Education branch to conduct consultations with teachers and students, and write a report about the school board's use of technology.

The board still has to look at its budget and decide what to do based on the recommendations in the report. This is expected to be completed by the end of June.

Among the recommendations made in the report are the need to continually refresh technology so it does not become outdated, standardize how technology is used in schools, improve technology infrastructure, such as wireless access, and better train teachers on the use of technology for teaching.

Currently, the school board has a program where every Grade 7 and 8 student has access to a laptop. However, many of these laptops are aging, and it would be expensive to continue the program, according to the report.

If the board follows the report's recommendations, the Grade 7 and 8 laptop program will continue for another two years. After that time, instead of each student having a laptop, there will be six laptops available in each Grade 7 and 8 classroom.

The report recommends that there be three laptops in each junior kindergarten to Grade 3 classroom, four laptops in every Grade 4-6 classroom, and six laptops in every high school classroom.

“I think that it's an issue of equity of access, so that our primary students, our intermediate students, and secondary school students, who all have different needs, have equal ability to access (technology), and it aligns to literacy and numeracy,” the school board's director of education, Catherine McCullough, said.

“Technology is not separate. It's an embedded part of all the good initiatives we're trying to do.”

The school board voted in favour of spending $134,000 on implementing wireless Internet access at its four high schools at its regular board meeting April 20.

“It will allow students to bring in their own laptops, and have access to the Internet,” Dennis Bazinet, the school board's superintendent of business and finance, said.

“When we had focus group discussions with the students, we learned many of them have their own devices, and they want to bring them in to take their notes, to stay organized, to do their word processing, and as they say, to do their research via the Internet. With that, is the whole protocol required as to acceptable use.”