Comcast Business announced that St. Elizabeth High School, a Catholic preparatory school serving the city of Wilmington, and surrounding areas is using Comcast Business Ethernet services to help support a mandatory 1:1 Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy for all students, beginning with the 2013-2014 school year. As part of a comprehensive plan to expand the use of technology – called the Viking Initiative for Innovation, or “ViFi” – Comcast installed the necessary bandwidth for more than 350 high school students to use iPads simultaneously as part of their daily curriculum – an initiative that has already replaced nearly all of the school’s textbooks and is expected to save local parents more than $500 per year.
Located on the southwest edge of the city of Wilmington, St. Elizabeth High School (SEHS) is a co-ed college preparatory school that has provided a Catholic education to more than 6,000 graduates since its founding in 1940.
As part of making its rigorous curriculum even more interactive, engaging and personal, SEHS recently required all students to purchase an iPad for the 2013-2014 school year – a move that has already replaced 95 percent of physical textbooks with eBooks and iBooks.
Productivity apps such as Notability, Google Drive, Pages, Keynote, Dropbox, Socrative, and iMovie will be pushed out to students through the school’s mobile device management system, along with more than 100 other course-specific programs that have been hand-selected by teachers based on independent testing.
“At the end of the day, our mission as educators is to fully arm our graduates for the future – both academically and technologically – and to ensure they have a strong familiarity with modern devices like the iPad and online services like video conferencing or Google Drive which provides them with the foundation they need to begin that journey,” said Shirley Bounds, principal of St. Elizabeth High School. “We knew that making the vision of our iPad program a reality would require finding a cost-effective way to upgrade our network. So when Comcast was able to provide us with significantly more bandwidth at a lower overall cost, we took a giant stride closer to achieving our goal of creating an all-digital educational environment for our students, teachers and administrators.”
