Four hundred Santa Maria Joint High School District teachers got Dell Venue Pro tablets on Jan. 13 as part of the technological push the district is making to coincide with Common Core education standards and the Smarter Balance Assessment test.
Eventually, the district is pushing for a 1-to-1 ratio of technology to students. Students won’t be getting their piece of technology until sometime in the spring, and the time delay will give educators a chance to get to know the devices and investigate which classroom applications best fit into their lesson plans.
Delta High School is currently piloting a 1-to-1-technology program for the district using Microsoft Surface tablets. District spokesperson Kenny Klein said the program has so far been a success, and the tablets have met student needs.
“It allowed them to really engage their academics,” he said, adding that the tablets enabled students to complete assignments at home, access the Internet at home, and share access with their families.
“They’re taking tremendous ownership of them,” Klein said.
However, not every tablet in the Delta program is accounted for. Just like any piece of technology, the tablets get broken, lost, or stolen.
Larry Dragan, the district’s director of information systems, said Delta experienced the same attrition rate as other schools with similar programs; an average of 3 to 5 percent of school tablets are lost, broken, or missing. But new software might help curb that percentage for the district-wide program.
The Dell Venue Pro tablets will come with a sort of LoJack system that will enable the district to track lost or stolen tablets when users go online. Dragan said the software was unavailable when Delta received its tablets in 2013.
Why the switch from Microsoft to Dell? A committee of teachers and students chose the Dell tablets as the best alternative to several that were tested.
“These tablets are just as powerful as a high-end laptop,” Dragan said.
And they are cheaper, costing the district about $403 a pop—that includes a keyboard. And the district is planning to keep an eye on its money using more than just a high-tech LoJack system.
Teachers actually had to check out the tablets they received on Jan. 13 from the library. Each tablet has a barcode and is engraved with a serial number, so the district will keep track of its new technology similarly to the way it checks out textbooks.
“It’s kind of ironic,” Dragan said.
This article appears in Jan 15-22, 2015.