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Santee School District Infuses Technology Into Primary School Curriculum With Support From School Web Lockers

Posted on: Wednesday, 21 May 2008, 09:00 CDT

Students at Santee School District, in the heart of San Diego County, no longer have limitations when it comes to incorporating the latest voice, video and graphics technologies into their projects. In fact, since adopting the School Web Lockers online storage and collaboration service in 2007, the district has unleashed a new era of creativity across its nine elementary schools.

More than 2,300 primary school students and 100 teachers in Santee are now using the School Web Lockers system, which allows them to experiment with the latest digital technologies. They were prevented from taking full advantage of these technologies at school in the past due to file sharing constraints inherent in the "thin client" limitations on the district network.

According to Katy Hammack, a curriculum resource teacher in technology for the Santee School District, the thin client computers save costs, but teachers and students have had difficulty moving files from computer lab to classroom to home.

"We had all of this great technology, but our students and teachers couldn't do much with it because they had no convenient way of electronically storing and then accessing what they had created," Hammack said. "We came across School Web Lockers at the National Education Computing Conference, and we instantly recognized that it could serve as the conduit for realizing our technology goals in the classroom. The price wasn't bad either, at $1.00 per student."

Now, even first and second grade students in Santee are learning about the process of creating, storing and sharing files through School Web Lockers. However, students must reach third grade in the district before they are assigned their own password-protected web locker, which can be accessed from school, home or any other location where an Internet connection is available.

Use of the School Web Lockers system is easy: users can create work on one computer, and then stash files in their web locker for completion later. The web lockers hold unlimited amounts of data, making them ideal for the large video, voice and graphics files that students frequently use. In addition, School Web Lockers can store files created on both Macs and PCs, and documents made with a wide variety of applications including PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Pixie (creativity software for children) and many others.

"The beauty of School Web Lockers is that the files can be uploaded into the system all in one piece. If a student incorporates JPEG images, video and voice into a presentation, for example, it can be stored exactly as it was created," said Hammack, whose work in the Santee School District has contributed to recognition three years in a row by the Classroom of the Future Foundation. "Some systems require you to separate out the components, which can get very tedious, especially for our younger elementary school students."

The Santee School District is participating in a fast-growing nationwide trend by using the cost-effective, web-based storage "lockers." The San Diego Unified School District currently has six schools using School Web Lockers including Point Loma High School, Correia Middle School, Dana Middle School, De Portola Middle School, Loma Portal Elementary School and Mark Twain High School. Other schools and school districts in Southern California that are also leveraging School Web Lockers' technology include Riverside Unified, Anaheim Unified, Bakersfield Christian, Paramount, Murrieta, Vista Murrieta and many others.

The online storage system offers numerous benefits, including daily backups of all files, and the ability to preserve files from year-to-year to allow students to easily create a portfolio of work. The service also offers built-in security and safety measures, such as blocked file types, a profanity filter, parental sign-in, and the ability for teachers and school administrators to monitor what students are storing. For added collaboration, School Web Lockers also provides teacher blogs and message boards (for school-wide or even district-wide online discussions.)

The School Web Lockers system is completely hosted within an off-site co-location center, which means schools not only reduce their investment in technology infrastructure, but they also eliminate software maintenance and administration costs.

About School Web Lockers

School Web Lockers is a leading provider of cost-effective, web-based tools for collaboration, distance learning, one-to-one computing and online storage. Formed in 2004 as a division of San Diego-based Networld Solutions, Inc., School Web Lockers today serves hundreds of K-12 schools and school districts across the U.S. with secure, easy-to-use computing solutions for students, teachers and administrators. School Web Lockers is a member of the San Diego Better Business Bureau. For more information, visit www.schoolweblockers.com or call 1-866-499-6527.

 Contact: Kelly Agrelius School Web Lockers 858-874-0464 Email Contact  Paula Johns Paula Johns Communications 760-487-1799 Email Contact

SOURCE: School Web Lockers

Source: MARKET WIRE

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