Kent School District is the fifth largest school district in the state of Washington. The district spans 72 square miles and is responsible for educating nearly 25,000 students across 42 schools. For Kent School District stakeholders the return to in-person learning presented an opportunity to embrace the benefits of continued adaptation and collaboration. A key component of that success was the deployment of Surface devices, Microsoft 365, and the educational tools therein. They serve to supplement the mission of Kent School District to successfully prepare all students for their futures. By providing modern education tools that enable accessibility and digital citizenship, the district gives students the necessary tools and skills to thrive in their lives beyond high school.
Embracing a college and career focus
In her role as the Assistant Director of Digital Learning for the district, Melissa Benner is on the front lines of matching the district’s goals with the right educational technologies. Given the number of students and staff in the district, she and the Kent leadership team needed a robust process for determining which devices were a fit for their strategic goals. Melissa explains that from her perspective, she wants “every student to walk in the door and have what they need to be able to complete their goals and to have their passions seen and heard. I have always really hung my hat on striving to leverage technology to provide that authentic opportunity for our students.”
Melissa took her dedication to empowering students into conversations about devices. The process included traditional feedback from teachers, staff, and administrators, but the Kent School District wanted to make sure that students were involved at every level. They even ran activities where students of varying ages would come in to work on accomplishing tasks using different devices before providing their feedback on the experience. One feature that came out of these exercises was a focus on digital inking, which became so important that it became a litmus test for potential devices.
According to Joelle Bejarano, Director of Strategic Initiatives for the district, “We were really intentional about engaging our instructional staff members, our students, our families, and a variety of other teams across the district to really understand our constituents’ various needs.”
The feedback from the stakeholders, including students, led them to Microsoft Surface devices. The students emphasized portability, and the teachers, staff, and administrators emphasized the wide variety of educational tools that were built into the Microsoft ecosystem. Today, students in grades six through twelve are using Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Plus devices and most younger students are using Microsoft Surface Go tablets.
A key component of the decision to adopt Microsoft Surface devices came from feedback that the team received about preparing students for college and careers beyond high school. Travis Haas is the Supervisor for Technology Support Services at Kent School District. In his view, “we have a strong commitment to making students college and career ready. Windows and the programs that run on Windows are the predominant platforms you'll find either in college or in a business environment.”
Joelle agrees with Travis and explains, “Our first strategic goal is to prepare students to be successful in college, their careers, and in life. So that is a primary consideration that we have whenever we're making selections for hardware, for software, and anything in between. We were really intentional about selecting technology that is used within the workforce to ensure our students are prepared to utilize technology in an effective way once they leave our system.”
Harnessing the right technologies to promote accessibility and digital citizenship
Kent School District’s innovative approach relies on making sure that all students are empowered to share their voices and participate in the solutions to the complex problems that their generation will confront in the decades ahead. Empowering all students requires paying close attention to issues of access and inclusivity. At their best, educational technologies can help overcome the barriers that have historically prevented some students from fully engaging in their learning environments.
Amber Gonzalez is the Teacher-Librarian and Technology Integration Specialist at Sawyer Woods Elementary School. In her role, Amber sees how students depend on educational technologies that have built accessibility into their ecosystems rather than thinking of it as an add-on software. She highlights the differences between Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge to make her point. She explains, “Some of our programs initially only worked in Chrome, but now that Edge is better, we fully transitioned to Edge because the accessibility features are so much better. For Chrome, you have to add it on as an extension at every turn and with Edge, it's all built in and it's super simple to access.”
According to Amber Raftery, a sixth-grade teacher at Ridgewood Elementary School, the Microsoft assistive technologies have been essential for helping her students with special needs. As she explains, “I think when we've got kids that need different support mechanisms to learn, the Microsoft assisted learning tools become really, really vital. Last year, I had a student that had dysgraphia and dyslexia and so being able to listen to the audio was necessary and the Immersive Reader was essential for the success of this student.”
The key, according to Amber Gonzalez, is that with Microsoft 365, accessibility and assistive learning features like Immersive Reader are always one click away. Amber commented, “It's easy for students to have an Immersive Reader button built in and available in every program or on every website—that is huge for my students and for me teaching students with different abilities.”
Providing all students with opportunities to engage the material and share their opinions is essential but it also carries responsibility. For the Kent School District, that also means paying close attention to the tools for teaching digital citizenship. As Melissa says, “Digital citizenship is building our students’ digital reputations and then also modeling a digital reputation as a staff member. How am I making sure that I have built a space that is inclusive in a digital world?” Joelle agrees with Melissa’s framing and extends it by noting that, “We’ve looked at digital citizenship through the lens of responsibility. What does it mean to impart a sense of responsibility to another person? I think that involves creating the space for them to learn not just the what and how, but also the why.”
Working together to create digital citizenship means thinking of instruction as more than just lectures. As Melissa and Joelle note, the students pay close attention to how their teachers and staff interact in their digital environments as a way of learning how to model responsible citizenship. Joelle notes, “We put a lot of priority and investment around cultivating digital citizenship for everybody in our school system—for students and adults. We partner with our adults to create the most enriching learning environments through digital tools, so digital citizenship is a critical facet to our overall technology strategy and creating the space and opportunities for our young and older learners alike to build their capacity around responsibility.”
Community and collaboration through Teams, OneNote, and Power Platform
As the world grows more connected, the next generation of students will depend on community and collaboration to find solutions that are workable for people from disparate backgrounds. During the COVID-19 crisis, the Kent School District turned to Microsoft 365 to help facilitate community and collaboration as best as they could with remote delivery. Even with the return to in-person instruction, these tools have remained a key component of the district’s plan to keep students learning.
Melissa lauds the power of Microsoft Teams: “I think the true value of Teams is allowing us to have a place for collaboration and connection. It builds a central hub where you can hang all your information to empower students. It has access to learning tools, and is something that creates connections between all of us, so you can manage student conversations and explore digital citizenship while learning.”
Joelle cites Teams’ capacity for adaptation. She says, “It has been interesting to see the evolution, adaptation, and various scenarios that Microsoft Teams has supported within our district. In classrooms, Teams is used as a learning management system, and I've seen it used within our school-based teams and our district-based teams as a resource for communication and collaboration. I have also seen it used to build community.”
Beyond Microsoft Teams, the Kent School District is utilizing OneNote to help manage the classroom experience for teachers, students, and parents. Emily Abrams, a third-grade teacher at Jenkins Creek Elementary, lauds the app’s value for educators. She says, “OneNote Class Notebook was my everything in remote teaching. Helping kids to use OneNote remotely just made my life so much easier and they were able to do some really amazing things remotely. Now that we are back in-person, OneNote is still an essential tool for my everyday interactions with students.”
Similarly, Amber Raftery continues to be excited by exploring even more possibilities with the app. Amber commented, “We are going to create digital portfolios this year using OneNote. This is a fantastic way to assess kids beyond the traditional measures. The students will pick the ‘cream of the crop’ of their assignments and place it into their own OneNote and then build their own portfolio. I am extremely excited to see their OneNote portfolios, since it empowers them to take an active role in their assessment.”
Last, but not least, Joelle explains how Microsoft Power Platform is providing the key data that can improve collaboration and community within the school district. She explains: “With Power Platform, our district has had an opportunity to think innovatively about what our processes are and how we use data to support those processes. Power Apps and Power Automate are really becoming increasingly impactful tools in how we digitize our various processes, innovate around those new processes, and therefore better leverage the data. Having tools like that have been transformative for our work and how we support our schools.”
As all these different voices attest, the Kent School District chose to embrace educational technologies that emphasize preparing students for college and their careers, as well as their ability to engage as digital citizens.
“We were really intentional about engaging our instructional staff members, our students, our families, and a variety of other teams across the district to really understand our constituents’ various needs.”
Joelle Bejarano, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Kent School District
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