WWPS Technology

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