The primary goals are to improve student learning and personalize and differentiate the student’s experience. Additionally, the intent is to provide teachers and students with a consistent platform to use inside and outside the classroom. This program means a device is in the hands of students daily with all the same applications that teachers can count on for their technology integration.

We began piloting iPads in 2011 and have found that they meet the needs of students and teachers with ease of use, application availability, portability, engagement and support. No tool is going to be perfect, but the iPad currently meets our needs and there is a growing community of schools that have implemented 1:1's along with us that we can learn from.

Tablets are being used in a variety of ways. including but not limited to: formative assessment, audio and video recording, multimedia projects, electronic text access, research, note taking, presentations, word processing, electronic, etc. Examples of how the iPads are used in our classrooms can be found in E-Connections publications.

The funding comes from the Technology Levy. More information regarding the 2016 Technology Levy can be found on our District Budget page.

While evaluation is ongoing, during the 2014-2015 school year and at the Superintendent’s request, a formal outside review of the program was initiated given the lack of empirical data in the literature, utilizing two educational researchers from University of Washington – Tacoma, Jarek Sierschynski, Ph.D. and Marcy Stein, Ph.D. Their program review was completed in August 2015 and the full review is available here, with an Executive Summary available here.

Yes, we continually evaluate technology and how it can be used within the district. Our main criteria for selecting devices is ease of use, manageability, applications and support available. While there have been great improvements and examples of how Kindles, Chromebooks and Surface tables have been used in the classroom, we feel that the iPad continues to provide our staff and students with a easy to use device that allows us to distribute content reliably.

Just as students forget other materials, classroom teachers will need to adjust when students are unprepared for class. There will not be any loaner iPads available for student checkout simply because they forgot their personal device.
If a student’s device is stolen, damaged or lost, the district will provide a temporary loaner until the replacement device is available.

Prior to the inception of the 1:1 iPad program and continuing to this day, teachers have been receiving ongoing professional development on technology integration in his/her classroom.  This includes an annual one day Summer Technology Institute, multiple monthly courses offered during the school year, just in time support from Technology Teachers on Special Assignment (TOSAs), and access to online support such as Atomic Learning and locally developed online courses.  Classes are grounded in best practice research on integration of technology in curriculum.

Absolutely! The App catalog includes e-readers like iBooks, Nook, Overdrive and Kindle. A student may read books they have purchased or checked out from a library on their school iPad. There are restrictions on downloading books. High school students are not allowed to download books rated/labeled graphic violence or erotic or books with the age restrictions of 17+. At the middle school level, students are not allowed to download book rated/labeled graphic violence or erotic or books above the 13+ age restriction level.
These ratings are set by the book seller/distributors, not MISD. If you have concerns about content your student is accessing via his/her iPad, please contact the administration at your student's school.

The MaaS360 management tool has the following monitoring abilities:

• Track the location of the device. By default this setting is enabled; however students have the ability to turn this feature off.
• Monitor the amount of free and used memory on the device.
• Monitor the list of apps on the device, the version of each app and when the app was installed.
• Push messages and transmit documents out to the devices (an e-book might be an example of a document, the user has to accept the documents.)
• Keeps a record of how long it has been since the device reported its status to our management solution (this will help us identify when devices are lost or stolen.)
• Remotely erases all data on the device (this would be used in the event of a theft or if the device is reported lost.)

It CANNOT do the following

• Read app data or usage (this includes passwords entered on any of the apps.)
• Control the cameras of the device.
• See the actual data stored on the device or data that is transmitted through the device. This includes passwords that are entered into the browser.

Federal law (CIPA) requires protection of students in school from certain material. This is one of the principle reasons that web searches are filtered on the campus networks.
The restrictions placed on what High School students can install on the iPad are:

• No movies rated higher than PG-13
• No explicit music
• No apps rated for users 17+ years of age
• No books categorized as erotic or graphic violence
• No games rated as Mature

Middle school students can not install apps. Additionally, they are restricted to:

• No movies rated higher than PG-13
• No explicit music
• No books categorized as erotic or graphic violence

In addition, we have disabled Facetime and iMessage as we felt that the possible negative uses of these applications outweighed the positives. Evaluating appropriate apps is an ever moving target and we continually work to ensure that students are not able to access inappropriate material.