Millard Adjusts to 21st Century Education

Prior to the overhead era of schooling, classes were taught with the old-fashioned chalk and board. Teachers scraped the utensil with the familiar clank sound to etch their equations to the class.

While the remnants of this time are still visible, schools are slowly catching up to the modern days with their tools. Millard brought the Smart Board technology into classrooms in the past decade, and now is looking to bring laptops to all their student next January.

This system is not completely innovative in Nebraska education, as District 66 provides a Macbook to each student and Creighton Prep issues iPads to theirs. However, this will be new territory for Millard, and because of this, the AP science and math classes were given their own laptops.

Each student has been able to try out the compact HP Stream, and have been encouraged to utilize them to their best ability. Students have been able to provide useful criticism and feedback.

“They provide a way for students to access key information that may be needed for classes,” senior Justin Lui said.

Teachers have been pushing more of a technological advance in their teachings this semester with Google products becoming more important, bringing a whole new perspective into the classroom, along with new features and ideas.
“They allow for more creative mediums for us to enrich our education,” senior Nate Urban said.

While the laptops have satisfied many students around the school, there are certainly areas requiring improvement. With some of the successes brings critics of the new devices as well.

“They can sometimes be literally garbage. They are so slow, and fail to run any meaningful programs. As the President of Comp-Sci club, they just aren’t very useful,” senior Matthew Meacham said.

Every advancement in education requires a bit of a transition period, to sift out the poor qualities, and better enhance the education process as a whole.

“Currently they seem more detrimental to the educational process with all the learning and uncertainty that have to be gone through by teachers in order to use the technology efficaciously. With many improvements, I believe they have a place in the classroom,” Meacham said.

Millard plans on carrying out their one-to-one program starting second semester in 2017, further ushering MN into the 21st century education.