District CIO

Queen Bee School District 16
Glendale Heights, Ill.

Benton Harbor Area Schools
Benton Harbor, Mich. 

Bryan Independent School District
Bryan, Texas

With so many cloud options, district CIOs should push vendors for details about their security and privacy services. “With the cloud, you have to ask big questions,” says Taiye Lambo, founder of CloudeAssurance. He suggests that CIOs assess three major security areas: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Next year, Sherwood, Ore. students will spend three fewer days in class, pay more for high school sports and no longer have specialists teaching technology in elementary school labs. The district proposed $1.72 million in reductions under the 2013-2014 budget unanimously approved by the budget committee.

A student convinced Blackhawk School Board members to videotape their meetings and post the video to the school’s website. Matt Young, a junior who made a presentation at Thursday’s meeting, told the board that video will increase “public access and awareness.”

The concept of a school library in a digital age is challenging. With the capacity to download books onto a range of digital devices, there is every possibility the library could look superfluous to youngsters growing up today. Why would you want to visit a room which is essentially about storage and distribution?

Districts are trading print for digital textbooks, with 22 states making significant digital content policy changes in recent years—altering the definition of a textbook and encouraging flexible funding, says Geoff Fletcher, deputy executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA).

Recognizing that American K12 students have fallen behind foreign students in their grasp of scientific principles, educators have devised a new set of teaching guidelines that will radically change the way science is taught in classrooms across the United States.

Cloud computing is taking K12 by storm with fully 90 percent of K12 institutions relying on or implementing cloud technology in 2012, according to the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). District CIOs are under increased pressure to cut costs and keep up with the latest technological trends, and implementing the cloud is an easy fix.