The student news site of Los Altos High School in Los Altos, California

The Talon

The student news site of Los Altos High School in Los Altos, California

The Talon

The student news site of Los Altos High School in Los Altos, California

The Talon

School Launches BYOD Program

Starting this fall, the school is implementing a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program for students. This program requires each student to bring a laptop with a screen of at least 11 inches to school every day.

The district has considered and researched the program for more than a year.

“When we received grant funding for additional Chromebooks, we decided to proceed with the plan,” Assistant Principal Galen Rosenberg said.

The MVLA Foundation and Google provided the funding for new Chromebooks for both the school and Mountain View High School (MVHS). LAHS will require students to have a device with them every day once all the Chromebooks arrive, which could be as soon as Monday, August 25.

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“[LAHS] will ultimately have more than 1000, but some will have dedicated uses outside of the ‘BYOD’ system,” Rosenberg said.

MVHS will not be implementing the BYOD program this year. Instead, MVHS will continue using the cart-based computer system previously used at both schools.

“Many teachers already had lessons that used classroom computers,” Rosenberg said. “Now that we can expect availability more consistently, we expect that more teachers will make use of this resource.”

The school did a trial of the BYOD program in AVID classes last year. Half of the students brought devices from home, while the other half borrowed from the school.

“In classes like AVID there’s a variety of things we do with colleges and everything,” AVID teacher Joanne Miyahara said. “[I think the digital devices will be really helpful because they allow] access to the resources you need to do searches on colleges or information about things like the SAT or ACT and [allow students to work on] a lot of the different leadership projects we do that are collaborative in nature.”

In order to facilitate the integration of laptops into curriculum, the school has been training teachers over the summer.

“This summer, I’ve been spending time transitioning a lot of what I used to print out and give to my students into Google Drive,” English teacher Caitlin Hannon said. “One of the things that’s really exciting about this year is that…we’re seeing this as a really cool experiment and an opportunity to try new things, and work with each other and work with the students…in a different way that I’m hoping is going to be a lot more efficient for the students and for me, and allow us to bring some new things into the curriculum as well.”

Students will receive more information about the program and how to check out Chromebooks in their English classes.

“One of our big tasks was to get kids ready for college and beyond,” district Superintendent Barry Groves said in an interview with the Los Altos Town Crier. “Now, everyone has a laptop when they go to class (in college). It’s just part of what you do – you submit online, you get feedback online. This is a good way to get students ready to use this technology when they graduate.”

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