St Mary’s College, Adelaide and Lenovo take digital education to the next level with ThinkPad Convertible and Ultrabook

St Mary’s College was gradually converting itself into a high-tech learning institution by initially rolling out a fleet of Lenovo ThinkPad X220, and progressively upgrading them with the new generation X240, to students in years 9-12. Due to the increasing demands of the uptake of technology subjects, the College made the decision to keep all four computer rooms. As part of the digital journey and the ongoing rollout of student laptops, teachers explored a variety of ways that would facilitate collaborative learning among students in the classroom. Staff acknowledged the need to implement digital pedagogy. They wanted to have some control and visibility of how the students used their laptops during class as well as using the mobile devices for learning and collaboration.

The College had initiated a notebook program 3 years ago where students from 9 to 12 were allocated Lenovo laptops for school use. While teachers were able to use Lenovo LanSchool classroom management solution to connect with student devices in the computer labs, they needed a solution to interact with the students’ laptops in their day-to-day classroom environment. The College had being using LanSchool within the computer rooms for years and decided to bring the solution to the teaching classrooms. For LanSchool to be an effective solution in the classroom, the teachers had to be equipped with a mobile computing device of their own that would allow them to freely roam around the classroom during their lessons. The use of LanSchool meant that teachers were no longer anchored to an IWB at the front of the classroom … (read more)