Technology and Innovation

All people are shaped by their environments, and the environment in which our students are growing up is media-rich, engaging, and dynamic. It is also driven by technology. Access to information is instantaneous and prevalent. No longer do students need to wait for an answer to a question -- it’s almost always at their fingertips.

This world has a great impact on how our students learn and evidence their knowledge. Technology is a vital part of District 30’s curriculum. It is present in how we explore our world, how we share our knowledge and how we connect with one another. As we prepare students for their academic and professional futures, we strive to ensure that they have valuable learning experiences which allow them to communicate, collaborate, and become globally-aware citizens. Technology can help provide these experiences and enrich student work in the content areas.

All of our schools are technology-rich learning environments, not technnology-centered, where students can use tech in a variety of flexible ways.  Our learning spaces can change to suit the lesson, the subject, or the number of students and offer a variety of tools for student use.

District 30 is a one-to-one learning environment, using iPads in our K-8 classrooms. These tools are powerful and engaging personal learning devices for our students, with a variety of applications across the curriculum.

For the past decade, District 30 has leveraged the power of Google Apps for Education (among other applications) with our staff and students. Online documents, presentations, websites, and media can be created and shared between students and teachers. All work can be accessed online at home so the learning never stops. It has been one of the tools that has allowed us to truly extend the classroom beyond the walls of the school.

We continue to center our technology conversations around the ever-important subject of digital citizenship. It is critical that our students consider the importance of their online presence, and become ever-vigilant about how they conduct themselves in digital environments. The tenets of Character Counts! are alive and present throughout our schools, and this includes our digital presence.