At the start of this year, due to the addition of Keegan’s role, as well as this year’s focus on devices for secondary students, we wanted to get to depth of knowledge of digital citizenship. The challenge was brought to Keegan to have the entire district completely Common Sense Media-certified by using the Innovation Academy program as shown below.
It was important to become purposeful in our deployment of devices in the district. Before last year, the district had never had a planned obsolescence cycle for devices. We had some questions to ask our schools and ourselves:
- What is the complete range of learning activities in which students will engage?
- What content, applications, and resources (e.g., peripherals) will students require?
- How will they include digital literacy throughout classroom practice?
- Does our infrastructure support our vision?
- What strategies will we use to communicate with stakeholders, obtain their input, and achieve their buy-in?
- How will funding cycles and traditional budget allocation models impact our deployment plan?
It boiled down to interviewing leaders at each school to define what their learning environments looked like and where they wanted to go with them. Schools were expected to include this change in their school improvement plans. This allowed us to define some requirements.
As a part of these conversations, Keegan was included to introduce and begin to invest time and resources into these school improvement plans. We documented the journey with each school in OneNote Notebooks, and talked to teachers and students (from the Students of Voice Committee) about what they needed. We did not ask what device they wanted.
The Outcome
We could not be happier with the outcomes so far. This year we were one of three districts nationwide to be selected as a Common Sense Showcase District.
Also, through meshing this strategy of intertwining digital citizenship with our planned obsolescence of device deployment, we have discovered a need. With the introduction of the App Store across many types of platforms, coupled with the push to cloud-based solutions, our data is becoming fragmented across multiple systems. This is causing many districts throughout the nation to reflect and adjust their student data privacy workflows to meet the demand.
We wanted to take this one step further with the introduction of an App Approval Tool. This tool, developed through our relationship with Microsoft and Common Sense Media, allows applications, websites, and hardware to be introduced by teachers.
The newly entered solutions flow through a series of privacy rubrics as well as the vetting of the application or hardware (see below).
The result is a solution that gives clarity and transparency to our life-cycle adoption of hardware and software, tied to instructional strategies. This produces data that can help drive our decisions when a solution is working well and when we need to find a replacement aligned to a particular instructional use.
Though this tool is still in its infancy, we hope to share this tool and many other best practices as we develop our policies and practices around this adoption life-cycle. The development of the tool should be complete by February, pushing both existing solutions and new solutions through as fast as our Privacy Committee and Tech Standards Committee can work. In addition, Keegan and I will be presenting this tool at ISTE this summer. Come and join us!
- 5 questions to help every district leader make better decisions - September 15, 2026
- Why K-12 cybersecurity education needs practice, not just awareness - September 14, 2026
- The compliance trap waiting on the other side of Title II - September 11, 2026