NEC has worked with the Duval County Public Schools (DCPS) school district (said to be the 20th largest in the US) to upgrade classrooms from projectors and interactive whiteboards to use V552 and V652 LCD displays with touch overlays. The installation has taken a year and a half and NEC was chosen after a ‘shoot out’ with three other suppliers. One of the attractions of the NEC solution was that standard Windows drivers were used for the overlay, meaning no need to buy or upgrade software.
The fact that we don’t need to worry about software anymore is huge,” said Jim Culbert, executive director of IT for DCPS technology services. “You just plug it in and forget about it. The plug-and-play functionality is essential.”
DCPS had begun to see success in using the learning center method, which utilizes independent stations within a classroom to facilitate learning. This type of classroom could comprise a group of students in one area of the classroom with laptops and an interactive display, another group with laptops and textbooks, and a smaller group with the teacher for more individualized instruction. Students move around the various stations and are given different ways to engage with teachers and other students to learn material.
“Teaching does not always happen just at the front of the classroom,” Culbert said. “We were seeing great success with the blended learning method, especially with middle school students, who tend to be restless, and this method helps keep them interested.”
The NEC interactive displays were purchased with media carts as part of a bundle, which allow the displays to move around the classrooms as needed.
DCPS’s superintendent, Dr. Nikolai Vitti, worked to secure enough funding for new technology that not only could be the standard across all classrooms, but was highly interactive and would create new opportunities for both teachers and students. DCPS now has 2,500 NEC displays across its schools and plan to have an interactive display in all core classrooms in each of its 45 secondary schools for the 2016-2017 school year.
