Separate School and Home Devices

Overview

Bronx Arena provides each student with a new Apple Macbook. While the initial upfront cost is high, the school benefits from greater longevity and less maintenance costs over the life of the device. Each student has their own device and gets to treat it as their own (adding stickers, changing backgrounds, etc); however, the devices must stay at school.

Bronx Arena provides loaner devices for students who wish to take devices home. While a good percentage of students already have access at home, those that don’t can checkout a Chromebook or older Macbook.

Bronx Arena has two requirements for students who take home a device:

1. Learning Goals - Students demonstrate a clear learning goal connected to using their device at home. This usually requires the student to meet with a teacher and discuss what sort of work they plan to do at home. This helps the teacher and student identify which work would be best suited for asynchronous at-home learning, and which work would be best to do in school with teacher support.
2. Learning Task Count - Students must meet Bronx Arena’s productivity benchmark. Bronx Arena recommends that students should complete five learning tasks a day, helping them monitor their productivity. These tasks are tracked, and students who are completing less than this amount, on average, are not able to check out devices. This benchmark provides an early indicator for students needing instructional supports and interventions from school staff, and at-home independent learning is rarely the best fit for these students.