Why is Orange County Schools implementing this now?
Six hundred and fifty teacher computers are at the end of their life cycle and are scheduled to be refreshed during the upcoming school year. By moving to laptops, as opposed to desktop computers, the district will be able to provide teachers with greater flexibility and allow them to work outside of the confines of their classrooms.
For several years no money was received from the state for textbooks; during the current year textbooks the district was funded at $15 per child. With most textbooks needing to be refreshed and not enough money to fund full textbook adoptions in all areas (except world languages), alternate resources were investigated. A wealth of interactive and primary source resources are available on the Internet and laptops would allow the schools to provide these educational materials to students in another format.
Orange County Schools will be moving towards the use of ebooks and online materials to support classroom instruction. When combined with the changing curriculum and impending 2013 online assessments, the district strongly believes that the time is right to begin using digital materials.
The initiative will be paid for with the funding generated by the Quarter-cent Sales Tax, Capital Improvements Fund Balance and other district accounts. These funding sources were selected because they cannot be used to pay for teacher or staff salaries.
Questions or Comments
Contact:
Angie Veitch
Director of Technology & Media
Orange County Schools
1914 New Hope Church Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
919-245-4100 x1
angie.veitch@orange.k12.nc.us