MOOSE JAW — Holy Trinity Catholic School Division continues to upgrade technology throughout its classrooms, including replacing expensive touch boards with interactive televisions to ensure children learn how to print their ABCs.
The organization is completing the fourth year of a four-year technology lease, so most devices are now on a sustainable and predictable replacement cycle, Mark Selinger, superintendent of learning and technology, told the board during its April meeting.
Holy Trinity is also replacing one-quarter — or 340 — of its Chromebooks per year, while the remaining laptops belong to Vanier Collegiate’s one-to-one program, he continued.
“Technology gets to be more expensive to maintain the older it gets, so it’s actually better for it to be refreshed than for us to try to maintain it,” the superintendent remarked, also noting that new technology has led to fewer help-desk tickets.
The division has been updating classroom technology since September, including upgrading HDMI connections, which has increased connection reliability and facilitated the mobility of teachers so they can connect their tablets anywhere in the room, Selinger said.
Also, roughly one-quarter of employees received new laptops, while every teacher’s iPad was updated to the latest model as part of the lease program.
Selinger pointed out that the division is replacing its classroom SMART projectors/touch boards with interactive AppleTVs, with the final replacements happening this year. So far, it has installed 26 interactive touch TVs in kindergarten-to-Grade 3 rooms.
“(Interactive touch TVs are) just a more cost-effective technology. We found that Smartboards were very expensive and not as frequently used for the touch capabilities as the cost might warrant,” he said.
“We did hear from teachers in the K-to-3 range that they really value that touchscreen ability so they could model for the students how to form the (alphabet) letters … (and can superimpose a document onto the screen on which to write).”
The division’s educational technology facilitator is also training K-to-Grade 3 teachers to help acquaint them with the TVs’ functionality, the superintendent added.
Holy Trinity is “very fortunate … to have a small but mighty” two-man IT team and doesn’t take them for granted, said Selinger. It’s difficult to keep professionals in-house to troubleshoot problems, so having two of them means they can keep the necessary, everyday technology running and seek support from third-party providers when necessary.
The division is being proactive with its cybersecurity and deployed a new platform last August, with software installed on all systems to monitor the network around-the-clock for suspicious behaviour and mitigate threats, he continued.
Furthermore, Holy Trinity has an independent contractor perform vulnerability audits on its computer systems every two years to ensure the security of the network and data is safe, with the next audit is in 2027, the superintendent noted.
Meanwhile, the division filters its Chromebooks’ internet activity, a feature classroom teachers can also use to monitor — and disable — devices and ensure students are on task, said Selinger. Moreover, it filters incoming emails and relies on Microsoft’s top-tier anti-spam and anti-phishing protection for extra filtering.
This filtering has decreased incoming malware and phishing emails, as the division received roughly 3,000 such emails per month in 2023-24, while that dropped to 1,200 per month this year, he continued. These reductions are likely because the organization removed staff emails from the website, making it harder for automated systems to send malicious emails.
Holy Trinity’s IT department maintains data backups for all critical services and files for several weeks, with multiple daily backups at the division office, Vanier and other off-site locations, he said. It also handles almost 90 security cameras, with most used to monitor schools’ front doors and some to watch parking lots, outdoor areas, hallways and common areas.
The division is also working to ensure technology at Our Lady of Hope Elementary School is ready for the fall, and while some items will be new, other older technology will be repurposed and transferred from St. Mary and Sacred Heart schools, Selinger added.
The next Holy Trinity board meeting is on Monday, May 12.
