The Digital Literacy Advisory Committee met earlier this
month to go through one more round of product evaluation. As I’m sure everyone knows by now, we are
looking at implementing a student laptop project next fall. Here’s an update on how this process has
worked to date.
Last April, College Community took over 40 teachers and
administrators to the Iowa One to One conference in Des Moines. At this conference we networked with a lot
of other schools currently implementing One to One and talked to a lot of
vendors. At the start of this school
year, a subset of the teachers who attended this conference were invited to participate
in the Digital Literacy Advisory Committee. The group is comprised of about twenty-five
teachers and administrators from across the district. We met a couple of times in September to
develop hardware selection criteria. Here’s a link to the criteria this team
created:
I approached five possible partners for this day: two national resellers (CDW-G and PC Gov
Connection), two manufacturers (Dell and Apple), and on local reseller (Erbs
Computer Services). Dell and Gov
Connection decided to collaborate.
However, they both elected to drop out of the competion about a week
before our vendor exhibition. This left
us with Apple, CDW-G (who brought Lenovo), and Erbs (who brought Fujitsu). Vendors present to the team on October 25th. However, there was no clear “winner” at this
day. Just as it often works with
learners, we found that each vendor needed more feedback to hit the target we
presented. So, after the meeting on
10/25, I gathered and synthesized all the data from the team, and gave each
vendor a set of targeted feedback.
The Committee spent the next few weeks re-evaluating
each vendor based upon this feedback. At
our meeting on January 11th, we narrowed the field down to two
finalists: Apple and CDW-G/Lenovo. We
hope to have a final decision made on hardware by the February School Board
meeting. Once this decision has been
finalized, I will make sure that we communicate it through multiple
channels.
Next Steps...
There is so much yet to do.
It’s very exciting and scary at the same time. I’m working with our two finalists to secure detailed,
and hopefully, aggressive pricing for their products and services. Simultaneously, the Learning Services Team
has been working on concepts for professional learning for next year. The Digital Literacy Advisory Committee will
next turn its attention to issues surrounding implementation policy – things like
bolstering parent and community involvement, insurance/damage/loss, student
filtering, just to name a few. Again, so
much exciting work is ahead of us. What
an exciting time to be a professional at Prairie!
