WWPS Technology

Aspen - Did You Know About the "Quick Chart Menu" Option? I thought I would use this space to provide additional information about some of the cool, less well known features of Aspen, our SIS, from Follett School Solutions. One of the hidden gems that I use all of the time, but few people use is the "Quick Chart Menu" tool. This tool allows you to take a quick look at the data in a visual manner. It amazes me that I get the same response whenever I'm sitting down with our teachers and administrators and I click on the Quick Chart menu. Whenever a beautiful bar chart, line chart or pie chart appears I get the following reaction. First they respond with, "Wait, what did you just do?" Inevitably their incredulity is followed by, "How did you get that?" Once I show them how simple it is to find and use the tool they all respond sheepishly that they can't believe such a powerful little tool was always sitting right under the nose. Users ca

Week 1 has ended, and by the end of the first week we rolled-out over 150 Chromebooks to every 3rd and 4th grader at WHES. It was a great week, and I'm already amazed at the type of work we're seeing being produced in our 3rd and 4th grade classrooms. I've already witnessed students using their Chromebooks to communicate, collaborate and create content with each other in their first week of school. Of course many of our students have already started to use their Chromebooks for research purposes, and fluency exercises on RAZ Kids or iXL. It's wonderful to see our students using their Goggle Apps for Education (GAFE) account to create content, collaborate with each other and communicate their ideas to their classmates. It was a great week, and I can't wait to begin passing them out to our kindergartners and first graders during week 2. We're also preparing for our visit from Commissioner Gist, and Governor Chafee on the morning of Wednesday, September 4th. It'

WHES 1:1 Chromebook Initiative The West Warwick Public Schools is excited to announce that Wakefield Hills Elementary School received an $80,000.00 grant via the Rhode Island Foundation and the Rhode Island Department of Education to purchase 1 to 1 Chromebooks for our students. Acer 7 Chromebooks were purchased for every PK-12 student at WHES. Our first step after purchasing the Chromebooks was to communicate with the community. Principal, Keith Remillard, Director, Jim Monti, and many of the staff at WHES meet with families and students during the last week of summer vacation to engage the community in a Town Hall type of event. Over 45 families participated in one of the three events, asked great questions, and received valuable information about our 1:1 Chromebook initiative at WHES. Our mantra of communicate, collaborate and create content was repeated over our 3 Town Hall meetings. Families received information about our policies, and some of our partner programs for low-c

I would like to start off by saying that both my wife and I are self-proclaimed workaholics. She's a 4th grade teacher in our district, and we often say that our home is one of the most dysfunctional in America for at least 10 months out of the year. It's not uncommon for both of us to be working into the wee hours of night on school related business. Our passion and dedication, and often times lack of balance leads us to the following question, "Why do we do what we do?" Well today's Ed Tech Unconference was a wonderful reminder as to why we do what we do, and one answer to the question. Earlier this morning in Barrington, RI over 50 educators representing 9 different school districts shared, supported, wondered and celebrated with each other. In small pockets throughout the Barrington HS Library Media Center educators socialized their intelligence around a wide array of topics. It was a wonderful example as to how much we love learning; that learning is a soci

Hi Folks: We have received the bulk of our Chromebook order for Wakefield Hills Elementary School. Mountain of Chromebooks! Over the next few days we will be sharing some times and dates in which teachers can pick up their Chromebook. Teachers will have the opportunity to get to know their device. Took some Chromebooks with me to the RI Ed Tech Unconference held in Barrington, RI today.  +Joanne Pigott  ,  +Kathleen DiMartino  ,  +Diane Tourangeau  ,  +Alicia Proulx  (set up her Mom's) got a jump start on using their Chromebooks. Feel free to email me directly if you want to grab a device, and get a jump start on the year. We will be putting together some dates for staff and student distribution over the next couple of days.

Wakefield Hills Elementary School was fortunate to receive a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation with the assistance of Holly Walsh and Commissioner Gist from RIDE for $80,000.00. WHES is now the second Innovation Powered by Technology model school in the State. We just ordered 380 Acer 7 Chromebooks, and we are anxiously awaiting for them to arrive. This grant will provide every student at WHES their own device. We ran a pilot program in the school this past March in which Leilani Coelho's kindergarten students became a 1 to 1 classroom. You can see some information on our 1 to 1 Computing: One Classroom at a Time page. We are so excited to have this opportunity for our students to communicate, collaborate and create content using 21st century tools. We'll keep you posted throughout our journey!

In an effort to provide voluntary summertime PD opportunities we will be posting PD sessions in a shared PD Opportunities calendar. You can view the calendar as a shared Google calendar from your WWPS Google account, or you can view it below. All of our Tech PD sessions will be available for drop-in sessions, or via a Google Hangout. Feel free to drop-in or attend via Google Hangout. Each session is a suggested topic, and we are willing to provide any assistance you need. Feel free to make a suggestion in advance, or when you drop-in. Use the form below to let us know what you'd like to work on during a PD Drop-in session. Loading...

The WWPS has been steadily moving to a completely cloud environment over the last three years. Three years ago we moved away from our Windows Exchange server environment, and implemented Google Applications for Education or GAFE for our faculty and staff. We piloted student accounts at all three levels (elementary, middle & HS) two years ago, and finally added student Google accounts for every student K-12 during the 2012-2013 school year.  Recently we made the commitment to move to a Chromebook environment for all of our students, and most of the staff. The district is also making a commitment to reduce the number of file servers that we support. It takes a lot of resources (time, money and IT staff intervention) to keep our file servers running. Most of our servers are older than our 4th graders, and we don't have the resources to replace them. It only makes sense for us to move network files into the cloud. I've completely moved all of my files into Google Drive for mo