Due to funding restraints and a required Provincial Savings Plan, our Wireless Writing Program will be modified and adjusted to a different and less expensive model.
Wireless Writing has met its educational goals and has been a very successful program for the last ten years thanks to the work of our teachers and staff. For this reason we are looking to continue the program, but it will need to change to meet the budgetary challenges.
The program in the past has cost around $406,000 per year inclusive of costs, staffing, pro-d and funding earned from rental charges or warranty repairs.
In order to continue with a program we will be changing the device and reducing the program to Grade 6 classrooms and using a different device. The new device will likely be an iOS iPad mini. We plan for this program to be supported for 3 years (2014-2015, 2015-2016, 2016-2017). More will come about this in future months including inservice training for Grade 6 teachers.
Grade 6 will be the target audience for the revised program because it is important that writing skills be developed before students make the transition to middle schools.
For the 2014-2015 school year we will continue to provide our current macbooks (into their fifth year) in a dedicated cart model for the Grade 7 classrooms. Learn60 apps will be an important piece to support diverse devices in the future.
This change will have downstream ramifications for other classrooms that have used our off lease WWP computers. There will be fewer available to replace our 9 year old macbooks which essentially will reduce the number of available devices for extra carts we have in schools.
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