This year’s State testing will soon be underway, but as has been the trend for a few years now it is hardly disruptive from a tech perspective. I’m grateful that the State settled on a provider and has stuck with them, it’s made for stability and familiarity for us supporting it, and I’m sure for our staff administering it out in the classrooms. Chromebooks came along at just the time that online State testing took hold, and Google works closely with the provider of the tests to make sure it’s well supported on Chrome devices. This parallel expansion has certainly helped make sure we have enough devices around to test students fairly rapidly.
And speaking of our Chrome devices, we’re already beginning to make plans for summer expansion and replacement. We don’t have a firm replacement cycle, we’ll keep the Chromebooks in service as long as they are serviceable, and that’s proving to be 5 years or so. But we do have some units reaching that age, and some others that we may replace just a little earlier in order to help spread out the burden of replacements (we bought more later, and so we’ll have larger numbers age out at once in coming years).
Classroom projectors are also a draw on tech resources. Teachers love the wall mounted ones, and they can provide interactivity for relatively little extra cost. But while we have some older wall-mounted units that are needing to be replaced (due to hardware failures), we still have classrooms that don’t even have one yet, and still have old projectors on small tables in the front of the room. Hopefully, we’ll be able to upgrade the last of these in the next couple of years.