Preparing students for future success is Rowan-Salisbury School System’s number one priority. Beginning in 2014, a committee of teachers, students, administrators, parents, community and school board members created a three-year strategic plan that involved transitioning to digital learning environments to ensure instruction, tools and content allowed for Connected, Collaborative, Relevant and Personalized (CCRP) learning experiences.
The district began its move towards creating CCRP learning experiences with its implementation of a 1:1 program. Each high school student received a MacBook Air, while elementary and middle school students received iPads.
Shortly after its 1:1 implementation, Rowan-Salisbury decided to partner with Discovery Education, a provider of digital content and professional development for K-12 classrooms.
With many Rowan-Salisbury school leaders having prior experience working with Discovery Education in other school districts, Rowan-Salisbury felt a partnership with Discovery Ed would be helpful in working towards achieving its CCRP learning goals.
With help from Discovery Ed, Rowan-Salisbury aimed to not only implement digital technology, but also provide its students with engaging learning experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have access to without digital technology.
“The district really wanted to bring the world into Rowan. It wanted to raise the awareness; [the school district] has to allow students greater opportunities to grow for them to really be able to recognize the many facets of information that exists but in a factual realm,” says Shayla Rexrode, education partnerships manager for Discovery Education.
After discussing its goals with Discovery Ed, the district decided to implement Discovery Ed’s Streaming Plus service, a comprehensive digital service supplementing instruction across all K-12 curricular areas, and Discovery Ed’s Techbooks, a digital textbook series that is aligned to rigorous standards and supportive of a comprehensive curriculum.
Beginning with the Streaming Plus service, teachers first delved into the technology themselves to get a feel for the technology and Discovery Ed platform.
“In the middle of last year we got Discovery Education and we just told all of the teachers their username and password and let them play for a little bit, kind of a sandbox type thing, to see what they could find and see what they were interested in,” says Ann Crilley, technology facilitator at Knollwood Elementary, Rowan-Salisbury School System.
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