Taking the high road to remote and hybrid learning at Davis School District

Davis County may be the smallest county in Utah geographically speaking, but don’t let that fool you. It contains the largest salt lake in the Western Hemisphere, and is also home to a staggering 90 schools, that range from elementary to high school, and service approximately 72,897 students within those schools’ educational purview. It is a county that, like so many others, is undergoing profound change in how it integrates technology with education.

The school-by-school challenge

Davis School District believes that when it comes to technology, the more local the decision making about how that technology gets used, the better. Mark Reid, the Technology Services Administrator for the district, describes the autonomy given to principals to make decisions in the best interests of their particular school. “Some principals have a set of devices that they might let students take home, but it's a check-in, check-out kind of a thing,” Mark explains. “Others might have areas that they're really focused on in their school, maybe in math, or science, to where they'll want to make sure that the right technology is being utilized in those classrooms.” 

As a result, Mark says, “We leave it up to the principals to decide how they want to best utilize their technology.” In addition, teachers can request software from the School Technology Specialist responsible for that school, who can then work to make those applications available.

This school-by-school approach seems to be working: Davis School District boasts a 95 percent graduation rate.

With so many students and schools, then, it’s important that a significant number of devices are available. The district has approximately 40,000 desktop and laptop computers, more than 65,000 Cloudbooks running Windows 10, and about 30,000 iPad tablets, resulting in a wide profile of devices available for schools to use. Some schools prefer the one-to-one model, while others benefit from a more focused computing lab environment. A few schools have as many as 12 labs available to students.  

When the move to High Access was first announced and planned for, and the scope of the need outlined, the district considered deploying Chromebooks, and even modeled how that deployment would work alongside its other systems and computing needs. But at the end of the day, Chromebooks just didn’t fit the bill. The district was already using Microsoft Office 365 for Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Teams, as well as Minecraft and other STEM-focused applications. Given the faculty’s experience and existing technical know-how, Mark notes, “We felt like going with Windows machines would be less disruptive to our teachers and our instructors.”

Of course, that meant deploying a huge fleet of new devices, and managing the cycling and refresh of devices as needed. For that, the district embraced Microsoft Intune and Windows Autopilot, which automatically enrolls new machines for device management.

More Intune, better support, and remote learning: A device in every student’s hand

Larry Dugger, Director of Computer Technology Support at Davis Schools, explains that when the district started looking at what Intune could do, they were excited to discover that students could use the Office 365 applications they were used to, Larry says, “If for some reason they took the device home, or off campus, they still had access to all those tools.” And if something went wrong, Intune allowed the IT team “to enact a quick recovery of systems, and not have to image. We can keep those devices up to date and moving forward, and not have to worry about those devices as much as we've had to in the past when we were imaging the desktops,” continues Larry.

By Fall of 2019, this made the deployment of those 40,000 devices easier, and far more efficient. According to Steve Deland, Network Manager for Davis School District, when it comes to the support technicians assigned to the schools, “Intune has simplified their job so much by not requiring domain machines that they have to maintain constantly, because now they have an Intune device that maintains itself. We've also been very busy transitioning some of our cheaper laptops into Intune, so it has been a real positive.”

As a result of that extra time, those technology specialists can spend less time on deployment and more time on activities that actually benefit the teachers and their educational efforts. “By going down this path,” explains Mark, “by using Intune and helping the techs timewise, it’s allowed them to become more of a technology coach, if you will, helping faculty on how to use technology in the classroom. That’s really the vision we’re working on, and it’s been very helpful.”

Saving more than time

Time spent on deployment and device management, of course, isn’t the only savings.  

Larry has been in the district more than three decades, and he recalls that back in 1999, the district had approximately 13,000 machines, compared to the massive numbers of devices they have today. “Over the intervening years, my budget has not grown very much,” he observes. “That tells me that we are saving the district thousands of dollars. We're doing more with technology rather than with people, and instead we're using their expertise. Now we're using the technology to help manage all these devices instead of just hiring a bunch of people.”

This is a critical point, because the reality of that many devices in the hands of that many students across that many schools is that device management isn’t the only demand on time.  Larry explains that, “obviously the more devices we have, the more maintenance that we have to do. We have broken screens we have to fix. We have devices that keyboards quit, those kinds of things.” They have been able to hire more hardware engineers to cover that load, because they need fewer people to manage deployment on the software end.  

Larry adds, “To me—and I’ve seen it over the years—it’s been a big cost savings using these management products, these desktop management products.”

Accelerating Windows devices, Teams, and professional development resources in response to a health crisis

When the COVID-19 health crisis struck, “We were on the third of our four-year plan to deliver High Access to everyone,” notes Mark. When authorities sent everyone home, “Our administration learned a lot at that time—some of the at-home devices could not authenticate when away from the school network,” he explains. “It solidified the district’s decision to standardize on Dell 3190 devices that could enable single sign-on and remote authentication.”

Dugger speaks fondly of the speed at which this change occurred. “We had to pre-provision each machine with the right software package. To do this, we used some of the tools that were available to us and Windows Autopilot, then Intune recognized the device and downloaded the right package.”

As Fall 2020 got underway, each student had a device to check out for the school year—approximately 75,000 Windows and iOS devices, running Windows 10, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams. CARES Act dollars were used to help ensure that students who did not have access to proper internet were provided internet hotspots. 

The district decided on a hybrid learning schedule to begin the school year. Each school divided its student population in half: students with a last name starting with A through K attended Monday and Wednesday, and then L through Z attended Tuesday and Thursday. The days one cohort attended in-person were designated remote learning days for the other cohort. Friday became a remote learning day for student self-study and educator time to prepare for future lessons. As the number of COVID-19 cases declined, the district eventually migrated everyone back to in-person learning for the remainder of the term. 

The advanced planning was a blessing. Soft school closures and reopenings were intermittent—usually paralleling the uptick and decline in COVID-19 cases, relegating principals, administrative staff, and educators to IT notifications to ensure continuity. Reid points out the nuances of that experience. “I think we’ve done well, giving them the tools they need on their devices to function in these various scenarios,” he says.

Leading the charge with professional development—across all grades

To prepare educators for the summer term and given the ambiguity of circumstances—especially at the elementary level—the district’s s teaching and curriculum teams worked together to port learning and content into Canvas, its online learning management system. Davis Schools successfully rolled out professional development training to ensure educator proficiency while conducting classes using curricula loaded into Canvas, which works with Microsoft Teams. 

According to Belinda Kuck, Director of Teaching and Learning at Davis Schools, when the district went home in early 2020, she thought it would be for a only a few weeks. When her team realized they needed to accommodate a longer remote and hybrid scenario, “We put two weeks of lessons plans in Canvas—all geography, US Studies, and Utah Studies were developed and distributed to educators in advance of the time it was needed.” She and her brilliant team of ELA, math and STEM supervisors and coordinators, around the district continued to stay ahead of the delivery curve and expanded that curriculum across grade levels and courses through the end of spring semester, reserving the last formal week of school to focus on incremental educator training. 

At that point Canvas was fully integrated into Teams as the district’s standardized learning management, delivery, and collaboration platform. In one week, Belinda says, “We retrained the entire district’s educators in Teams, and by the end of May, we were prepared for Fall.”

Kuck attributes the program’s success to advanced planning of her team’s curriculum development and distribution—giving educators time to review and process the material prior to prime time with students. For example, she says, “On August 1, we had the first-term curriculum into the system, we did another update in October to prepare educators for the start of the November term, and so on.”

The Microsoft Educator Community resources were also used to train educators on how to structure and deliver coursework in a remote and hybrid scenario—an effort close to the hearts of those involved. “Eventually, we focused on making the educator the center of the learning and gave them the opportunity bring their own unique styles into focus,” observes Dugger.

The process worked. Learning continuity persisted in both models, thanks to the monumental efforts of the district’s Teaching and Learning Department and the IT infrastructure that was put in place at the start the 2019–2020 school year.

During hybrid learning, educators used Teams to stream live sessions to remote learners, while working face-to-face with students. This was especially important at the elementary level, where students loved having the opportunity to socialize and engage directly with other students and their teacher. In one instance, an educator who had the virus, but was still able to work, taught remote and in-class students using a laptop set up at the front of the classroom, so both cohorts could engage and collaborate.

Conclusion

Davis School District’s journey to High Access maintains its commitment to “provide an environment where growth and learning flourish,” in the words of the vision statement. The current generation of students, so far past the threshold that marked digital natives, has a different relationship to technology and how to use it in pursuit of learning. “If you look at students today, especially a lot of our students, the expectation is things just need to work,” Dugger explains. “The devices and apps need to be available to them. Their expectation is when they come into a class, if it's a coding class, that everything they need is available to them.”

In the older model, with fewer devices, choice was constricted. “We used to feed them and say, ‘Here's the applications you ought to be using.’ But that was years ago. We were pushing applications to them,” reflects Dugger. “Now, they're able to go out and get this stuff right off the internet and do things on the internet from wherever. It's really about access. For us, the key question is how we help them keep access to that, yet keep them protected, and still keep them moving in that educational direction.”

Two years of implementation down the road and one pandemic later, it looks like the Davis School District has found an answer.