What is an eSchool?

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What is an eSchool?

A 21st century, cutting edge eSchool is rich in technology and takes advantage of the latest innovations to ensure that your children get the best education possible. Records are accurate and up-to-date. Nobody is perfect, of course, but with the right tools any mistakes are quickly caught and corrected. In a true eSchool you don’t have to take any of this on faith; you can watch with your own eyes (and your own computers) as your child (or your student) grows and learns.

In the old days, when we wanted to know what progress our children were making or what challenges they faced, we had to take time away from work. Competing with each other for a few minutes of time in parent/teacher meetings can be an exercise in frustration. Of course we could also ask our children how they were doing; sometimes that even results in accurate information. If your kids are like ours, though, they probably have a slight tendency to slant things in their favor.

Of course face-to-face contact between teacher and parent is very valuable... but it’s not enough. Today, we want access to a record of our children’s grades and homework. If our children are having problems in school, that should be brought to our attention immediately. If our children are doing especially well at school, we want to know that, too.

If there are tools that can help our children learn -- tools that can even address the specific learning styles or challenges faced by my child -- then those tools should be available and they should be used. Yesterday, we would not think of sending our children to school without pencils or books. Today, there are tools that can literally put the world and all of its collected knowledge in the hands of our children. Today, we should not even think of sending our children to school without those tools. Not tomorrow; today.

Let’s talk about an eSchool. Let’s talk about AISK.

Access to information. Today the sum total of all human knowledge has been collected in a way that has never before been possible. With the guidance of their teachers, our children need access to that knowledge.
Strong communications. Parents, students, teachers, administrators, support staff: we’re all working together toward the same common goal. Helping many people to pull together can be challenge; eSchool tools can make that happen.
Parental involvement and awareness. You can’t spend a lot of time at school, trying to find out what’s going on; there are too many demands on your time for that. You should be intimately involved in (and completely aware of ) your child’s activities -- grades, homework, challenges and successes -- but from home, from work, or from wherever you happen to be.
Teaching Tools. We all want teachers to spend their time in the classroom -- not filling out paperwork, or recreating the wheel by designing resources that thousands of teachers have used before. We can ease the load outside the classroom, so teachers can spend more time teaching.
Administrative support. Simply put you want an administration that handles what needs to be handled; that guides and supports without getting in the way.
A solid foundation. We don’t look at a person and think of how wonderful their skeleton is, or look at a building and see the beauty of its plumbing. Cables and servers and wireless networks: all of these things must just work, smoothly and conveniently, without drawing attention to themselves.

The big news this academic year is the many new systems that have been tailored for implementation and the continued growth of AISK as a leading eSchool. We have ensured that our move to a new campus next year will bring us to a facility that technologically and academically will be a model for schools in the Caribbean. We have been working feverishly with many experts to design a robust wireless network and a specialized foundation to support Apple computers throughout our eSchool. We have handpicked software to manage school information and online learning resources for the 21st century.