We are confident that we will be able to give our students an exceptional educational experience in common core and online learning
Like many school districts across the United States, the Oyster River Cooperative School District (ORCSD) in New Hampshire is making the move to Common Core. As part of this move, we are implementing changes not just in lesson plans and classroom activities, but also in our network infrastructure.
As we started transitioning to a version of the Common Core State Standards called the New Hampshire College and Career Ready Standards, it became clear that our previous network infrastructure lacked the capabilities and capacity necessary to support the wireless devices that Common Core’s curriculum and assessments require.
Prior to Common Core, ORCSD was providing wireless devices to classrooms, but not at a 1:1 student-to-device ratio. With tight budgets, implementing a full one-to-one program via district-owned devices was cost-prohibitive in the short term.
However, we noticed the increasing number of devices that our students were bringing to school, and we viewed it as an opportunity to supplement the district-owned devices already deployed in the classrooms to expand our students’ access to the network and the valuable educational resources that reside on it. Rather than block students’ personal devices, we embraced them, and put them to work helping our students and teachers move toward the Common Core.
(Next page: How to implement this BYOD initiative)