The latest round of desktop replacements for teachers and staff has been rolled out this last month. We buy 30 or so machines at a time several times a year and replace staff computers on roughly a 5-year cycle. Doing it in these smaller groups makes it quite manageable whatever else is going on, and allows us to be flexible in terms of targeting the highest needs at the time. At the same time, we’ve just replaced about 75 teacher Chromebooks that were aging out.
Next year our middle and high schools will still be 1:1, but our elementary schools will return to carts in classrooms. They won’t be at 1:1 anymore as some of the Chromebooks will be aging out, and the current 4th grade will be taking their devices with them into middle school, but they should still end up with more carts than they had pre-pandemic. Our current 8th grade was deliberately given the oldest Chromebooks that would age out soon. They will give those back in June and be issued with a new one (which is already ordered and on their way here) for their freshman year. And there are discussions going on now for what the best model is for TEAM and LRA going forwards.
Data integrations are a more and more common thing we are called upon for. Even quite invisible things like allowing staff and students to use their Google credentials to log into other services requires us to establish backend connections, so students don’t need another password for Destiny (our library checkout system) for example. In order to make it easier for parents to log into Naviance, our new online CLC tool, we were asked to integrate Skyward parent logins with Naviance. This wasn’t straightforward and involved quite a bit of back and forth with both Naviance (who had some bugs in their system) and Skyward’s test setup (we weren’t allowed to try this on our real Skyward setup until it had been shown to work successfully). But just in the last week we ironed out the wrinkles and got it working on the test site, and are now waiting on WSIPC to set up the necessary components on our real Skyward instance.