In the past couple of years, the Fair Grove School District has made major additions in the technology department. This, of course is to help keep up with today’s high-tech lifestyle, and the constant changes being made in the way kids learn today.

“Within the past few years, we’ve added Wi-Fi campus wide, over 300+ Chromebooks school wide, 75 new laptops for teacher and student use, along with increased Bandwidth, Server Capacities, updated our firewall, and also started the use of Google Apps,” explains Technology Coordinator Dee O’Dell.

“In the high school alone, we’ve added 75+ Chromebooks, along with carts of Chromebooks in the library, for teachers to check out for their students,” states High School Principal Mike Bell.

Adding all of this new technology should improve students learning abilities and bring new ways of learning to classrooms throughout the school. “As far as how this new tech. helps the learning experience, I think it prepares students for college, and the real world itself. It gives you further tools and skills for going into the workforce or college, and gives teachers a new range of techniques for teaching in the classroom,” acknowledges Bell.

The Chromebooks are currently used in many classes;  including Newspaper, various math and English courses. Students use these to research projects, and even graph charts in math. Currently in newspaper, students use them to write up their stories and share them via Google Docs, a much faster process then what has been used in the previous years. “With all this new technology, it’s allowing teachers and students to share information quicker and better, and also use stuff that we are used to using,” says O’Dell.

Of course acquiring all of this new technology wasn’t free, as Bell explains, “Our Board of Education did a lot to help us obtain all of this, and they made sure that students would have this new equipment to help improve the learning experience.” The district also completed a 50/50 grant, which also helped towards funding.

Schools across the state and across the nation are doing their best to keep up with the latest and greatest gadgets in today’s technology bound society. Even with many changes in teaching in the past few years, students and teachers alike could still see many more changes in tomorrow’s way of learning.