What is a Future Ready District?

The Future Ready District Pledge is a commitment by superintendents to work with educators, families, and community members to help achieve a district of Future Ready schools. The Future Ready District Pledge is designed to set out a roadmap to achieve successful personalized digital learning for every student and to commit districts to move as quickly as possible towards a shared vision of preparing students for success in college, careers and citizenship.

What is Mariposa County Unified doing to be Future Ready?

Mariposa County Unified schools are on a multiyear plan to provide portable devices for all students in grades 6-12. Starting this school year, our 7-8th graders will have iPads and our HS will have 1:2 touchscreen Chromebooks (with a full take home 1:1 rollout in at MCHS 15-16). All students countywide in grades 5-12 will have access to Google Apps for Education. Mariposa County has placed a huge emphasis on teacher PD, with a better than a 8:1 ratio of teacher training days, including an emphasis on 4Cs lesson design. Mariposa students have access to digital tools like ESGI, MobyMax, Starfall and hundreds of free open education resources apps. Beginning this year STEAM (Science, Technology, Art, Engineering and Math) will be emphasized. One example of that is the area of Coding and Programming, which all students will be expected to learn at a basic level.

Social Media is going to be an important tool for Mariposa’s future community involvement. As part of our state-approved LCAP plan all schools will have a Facebook page to connect schools and parents: www.facebook.com/mariposaschools

MCUSD’s school in Yosmite Valley was featured at Skype.edu’s main page for a week last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beA91B_Zvvs

Recently, Mariposa HS tudents produced this video as part of the first week of school activities, with over 1800 views the first weekend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PycqM7PoEmA One of our biggest early contributors to social media is Mariposa County HS: https://www.facebook.com/MariposaCountyHighSchool , with all sites planning on sharing good news about teaching and learning on Facebook.

Network speed:

The single biggest impediment to educational technology in Mariposa County was recently removed. Last Spring our connection to the California High Speed Network finally went from 45mbps for the whole county, to a modern speed of 1000mbps. Our outlying schools are still strapped down to 3 or 6mbps, primarily due to their remote locations, we are hoping to push the speeds to 10mbps this year.

MCUSD has rebuilt our entire wifi infrastructure last year and now it is stable and thin wap based, meaning MCUSD IT staff can tune all the APs remotely. 

Internal Successes:

Our infrastructure is now fully equipped with VLANed Level 2 switches (which means we can control them really well for filtering and internet speeds), although some devices are aging and will need to be updated. We have fantastic internet speeds in 80% of our schools, but suffer from a lack of fiber-based access from vendors in our outlying schools. MCUSD has recently upgraded our wireless access on all sites and and it is now fast, stable and easily configured remotely, making our wi-fi a point of strength.

Success in Local Media:

Mariposa schools have have several very well-recognized projects in local media recently:

Woodland teacher Daniele Grate’s 8th Grade Space Balloon Project:

http://abc30.com/education/mariposa-county-students-share-amazing-video/211101/

Yosemite Valley School was featured at Skype.edu this last year for using Skype for their students to do “Mystery Skype” activities with students from around the world:

https://education.skype.com/news?page=9

Our County teacher of the year focused on 1:1 Chromebooks in an Alt Ed setting with tremendous success:

http://www.mariposagazette.com/news/2014-05-08/Front_Page/Kelly_is_named_Teacher_of_the_Year.html

A local educator’s blog about EdCamp Yosemite, a free event for CA teachers, hosted at Yosemite Valley School:

http://wmarkhall.com/2014/04/06/yet-another-example-of-great-professional-development/