“I was actually taken aback by just the crumbling infrastructure, from our network to what was going on in the classroom, and there weren’t two classrooms that were alike,” he said.
When the pandemic hit a few months later and the district moved to remote learning, Fishtrom said he and his team jumped at the chance to survey teachers about their tech needs, upgrade the network and curate a standard suite of ed-tech tools for every classroom.
Now, as the close of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds and the Department of Education ushers in a new era of fiscal uncertainty and less federal guidance, he’s sharing how his department used careful technology planning and investment to make teachers more comfortable and effective, improve the learning environment for students, and ease IT staff workload.
A UNIFORM TECH ENVIRONMENT
For starters, Fishtrom said he asked teachers to choose a new laptop to use during COVID-19, either a MacBook Pro or Dell Latitude Notebook, then paid for those computers with pandemic relief funds.
The fiber repairs and school ed-tech tools were paid for with a combination of bond money and general funds, Fishtrom said. His vision was a uniform tech environment in every classroom, he added, which teachers would find easy to use and administrators could scale as necessary.
Fishtrom and his eight-person IT team took input from teacher surveys and got to work testing different devices. The pandemic’s empty school buildings allowed them to stage tech placements and develop blueprints for clean wiring.
In the end, the team selected the following devices for all 230 of the district's classrooms:
- Dell or Mac laptop
- docking station monitor that can connect to any device
- short-throw Epson projector with screen that doubles as a whiteboard
- Lightspeed Topcat classroom audio system with teacher mics
- Vivi wireless presentation tool to connect any device to the projector
- document camera
- printer
“This model, with the docking station in every single classroom, you can teach from any classroom in the district with your device, because we’ve made it universally compatible,” Fishtrom said. “That in itself has been a game-changer.”
PLANNING PAYS OFF
The uniform tech environment also makes asset tracking and refresh cycles easier to manage, Fishtrom said, and allows the IT team to master the ins and outs of district ed-tech tools.
“We document everything we do, and we have our monthly meetings where we share best practices,” he said. “It’s really helped us support our staff, so their teaching is not interrupted and student learning is not interrupted.”
Fishtrom said the performance of these seven devices has also been a boon to district students and teachers. For example, educators can use their Lightspeed Topcat mic from anywhere in the room, he said, and their voice will be evenly distributed through a connected classroom speaker.
“Every student can hear because of the distributed audio,” Fishtrom said. “That makes such a difference in teaching and learning. I mean, the bottom line is the student cannot learn if they can’t hear.”
Then, if the teacher wants to put on a playlist while students do artwork, for instance, he said they can connect their phone to the Vivi tool, turn the Epson projector on, and the music will come through the Lightspeed speaker.
Among the benefits of the Epson projector, Fishtrom said, are that it has a 110-inch screen and uses laser projection, which makes it easier for students to see without having to close the blinds or turn off the lights.
GET A VISION
While adequate funding will always be necessary to invest in new school technology, Fishtrom said the vision and support of the technology team, along with district leadership, is equally if not more important.
“If you have a vision and a plan, and you work closely with the cabinet and the board and your team, you can make some really good decisions with the funding you have," Fishtrom said.
