WWPS Technology

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...