It’s a very relatable challenge. Florida school district Duval County Public Schools had projectors and interactive whiteboards deployed in its classrooms, but there was no real across-the-board standard for the schools’ core interactive classroom equipment.
Plus, it was getting old. Replacing projector bulbs was becoming a chore. Lights often had to be dimmed. Interactive whiteboard software was out of date.
And of course, not all schools had the funding to deal with these issues.
DCPS’s superintendent, Dr. Nikolai Vitti, realizing that taxpayers were footing the bill, worked to secure enough funding for new technology that not only could be the standard across all classrooms, but was highly interactive and would create new opportunities for both teachers and students.
“In order to better serve our children’s learning needs, it was imperative to make district-wide updates to our interactive classroom technology,” Vitti says in an NEC Display Solutions case study.
“Today’s children think and learn through technology, and we needed to provide teachers with the tools to accomplish that. Touchscreens provide a direct interactive classroom connection with our curriculum, and that is important for students to experience.”
DCPS leadership asked school administrators and teachers what they were looking for in a touchscreen technology solution to make sure it hit the mark. After a selection process involving four vendors that each submitted a proposal, DCPS chose NEC Display Solutions’ V552 and V652 displays with touch overlays, and began deploying them across the Florida school district classrooms.
NEC Display Solutions Helps with Standardization
One of the biggest factors in the Florida school district choosing the V552 and V652 models was that the software inherent to the displays uses native drivers within Windows, eliminating the district’s problems with outdated software and the costs of upgrading.
[related]
“The fact that we don’t need to worry about software anymore is huge,” said Jim Culbert, executive director of IT for DCPS technology services. “You just plug it in and forget about it. The plug-and-play functionality is essential.”
Another factor was the displays’ portability.
DCPS had begun to see success in using the learning center method, which utilizes independent stations within a classroom to facilitate learning.
This type of classroom could comprise a group of students in one area of the classroom with laptops and an interactive display, another group with laptops and textbooks, and a smaller group with the teacher for more individualized instruction. Students move around the various stations and are given different ways to engage with teachers and other students to learn material.
“Teaching does not always happen just at the front of the classroom,” Culbert said. “We were seeing great success with the blended learning method, especially with middle school students, who tend to be restless, and this method helps keep them interested.”
Read the entire NEC Display Solutions Case Study on Duval County Public Schools.
