HARLINGEN — It’s happened again. The Harlingen school district is receiving 250 to 300 tablets through the Sprint 1Million Project, this time solely for Early College High School.
“It’s really meant to extend the classroom,” said Veronica Kortan, administrator for Organizational Development for the Harlingen school district.
“We did it last year, with lots of great feedback,” Kortan said. “The devices come equipped with Internet services and so that has helped a lot with getting kids to get their resources.”
Last year, the district received 110 tablets and 190 smartphones through the program. They were distributed to select ninth-grade students from Dr. Abraham P. Cano Freshman Academy, Harlingen School of Health Professions, and Early College High School.
“It allows them to take those devices home and regardless of economic status they are able to extend their classroom,” she said.
The tablets are important to ECHS because of its partnership with UTRGV to offer college credit.
“If you think about the way kids learn today, it’s really important that our teachers learn how to teach with instructional technology,” Kortan said. “It’s not replacing a pencil with a device, it’s really using the device to extend the learning and giving
kids a different way to do that.”
The devices will prepare them for tomorrow’s challenges.
“All of our colleges and universities now have a learning management system where you submit work and have different discussions all online,” she said. “They are here in high school, they are submitting hard copies of assignments, then they go off to college and it’s all online.”
She emphasized the importance of ECHS students having those skills because they will be dealing with university personnel.
