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A Look Into the Future of (New Hope) Education

May 21, 2014 News

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As summer draws near, students begin to plan how to spend their time off while teachers get geared up for another exciting school year. This has been one of the busiest semesters for New Hope Carolinas’ teachers, implementing a vast array of new educational programs, hardware and solutions for their student body aimed to ensure students stay engaged in their studies. Knowing that education is an ever evolving experience, educators at New Hope have teamed up with their IT department to bring students the resources needed to keep up with education in the 21st century.

Student Network: The experience students have while participating in interactive learning and online education is largely dependent on the quality of the network available to them. Realizing how key this single item is in the classroom environment, New Hope Carolinas has completely segregated the student network from the New Hope Treatment Centers’ network in an effort to streamline the end-user experience. The bandwidth of the new student network has also been tripled to 50mbps allowing for more devices and more students to connect at once without impacting the quality of the connection.

Student Devices: One of the most exciting changes to education over the past 10 years is the prevalence of the 1 to 1 rule in a classroom environment. The goal of this idea is simple: try and provide each student with their own device for a more personal experience. New Hope Carolinas has provided each student using our online learning initiative with a laptop so they are free to work at a pace that is best suited for each individual. In addition to laptops, tablets and PC’s, New Hope Carolinas has also installed several Promethean Boards and a Smart Table to generate a more interactive learning environment.

Electronic Learning Initiatives: With the backbone firmly in place and a device in each student’s hand we moved on to the more exciting side of this initiative— finding programs and solutions that would keep our students engaged and help our teachers streamline their efforts as educators. Programs like Odysseyware, DiscoveryED Techbooks and Accelerated Math have been adopted for the 2014-15 school year to help guide student development. We have also implemented programs like Gradelink and STAR Reading to help teachers better track and monitor student progress.

There is no doubt that the landscape of education has changed drastically over the past decade. Textbooks are being traded for tablets, notebooks swapped for laptops and whiteboards being scrapped for Smart Boards. New Hope Carolinas has embraced this boom in technology and provided students and teachers the resources for a dynamic learning environment. Come back next semester to follow our school’s progress and to learn more ways that New Hope Carolinas is blazing the trail in the future of education.