The Val Verde United School District (VVUSD) is located in Riverside County, CA. It serves a diverse community of nearly 19,700 students in grades K-12 with twenty-one schools including ten elementary schools, four middle schools, two comprehensive high schools, two alternative education schools, a Virtual Academy, and preschool programs in four elementary schools. VVUSD is a winner of the National Blue Ribbon School award and multiple California Distinguished School awards, and it continues to innovate in teaching and curriculum delivery in the classroom.
The Challenge
VVUSD needed to update its classroom technology to enable teachers to display and annotate teaching materials on their PCs to more easily share content. Teachers were equipped with a workstation tied to a digital network with LCD Projector, speakers and a DVD player controlled by a pole vault system. They also had document cameras and some whiteboard interaction capability.
The Solution
Equipping all 800 VVUSD teachers with Splashtop Whiteboard on an iPad to display and annotate any content from their PC freed teachers from their desks and allowed them to interact more with students. The IT organization had fewer devices and platforms to manage, saving them time and money.
Teacher-created curriculum materials such as PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Excel workbooks are available to staff through shared drives and can be created or loaded into Splashtop Whiteboard’s ipcharts.
Mobile Classroom Management
Many elementary school students are digital natives who often have more experience with technology than the teachers. Using an iPad with Splashtop Whiteboard allows teachers to hold the students’ attention while focusing on teaching, rather than classroom management.
“To improve our classroom technology we wanted to replace our tablets with iPads and needed an application that would allow us to control and display the teacher’s desktop PC," said Mike McCormick, VVUSD Superintendent and Riverside County Administrator of the Year, 2012. " We considered smart boards but they are absolutely not a solution for us since they tie a teacher to the whiteboard. We discovered Splashtop Whiteboard and it was hands down the best software that we could find on the app store that really met our immediate needs.”
Splashtop not only filled an instructional need in the classroom for VVUSD but also made fiscal sense because of the volume purchasing program and the ability to afford an iPad with multi-purpose software for the same cost as replacing a tablet which had limited applications.
“When I started here 11 years ago, we were a program improvement school with API scores of 600," said Jeremy Bateman, GATE teacher at Victoria Elementary School, technology pilot leader, with thirty-four iPads in his classroom. "When we started improving our technologies our scores grew dramatically to the point where we are now a National Blue Ribbon School and a California Distinguished School. We are one of the highest rated schools in Riverside County although we still have a low socioeconomic population. I know these technologies aided in achieving this.”
