The BRINC Consortium – which started in 2012 with four First State school districts collaborating through an innovative learning grant – is expanding again. The Capital and Polytech districts will join this fall - bringing the total number of districts involved to nine.
Started in 2012 through a state Department of Education grant, the group is working to transform the way high school teachers teach and students learn by focusing on effective use of new technology.
However, the adoption and implementation of that technology has taken longer than anticipated.
Steve Mancini, Supervisor of Information and Instructional technology for the New Castle County Vocational Technical School District and Co-Chair of the technology BRINC work group, says the first major achievement was adoption of a learning management system – think of it as an online portal for sharing of information and documents – across school districts.
"You know traditionally from a technology standpoint everything has always been kind of siloed where you’d have instructional people making certain decisions and technology people would make certain decisions and they didn’t necessarily all line up," Mancini said.
Mancini says it took about nine months to agree upon a program, but ultimately decided on the platform Schoology, and WebEx for video conferencing. Schoology replaced Blackboard -the previous technology used.
A key component of the technology enables the sharing of resources and lesson plans, which has been a point of contention for some teachers.
"Teachers kind of hold that as their secret sauce. You know, this is what makes program greater, this is what makes my program great, is the time and effort I’ve put into this curriculum and this lesson that I’ve built," Mancini said. "And now you want me to share that with our competition?"
However, Mancini says he's seen a lot of progress on this front.
“If it’s the right thing to do for the student – if it’s going to make everyone better – then that’s what we need to do," Mancini said. "And that’s one of the things our superintendents challenged us with. They said ok, we want you to be committed to this, we want you to do what’s best for the students and if it means sharing materials then that’s what we’re going to do.”
Mancini says most are now on board with the sharing of resources, but adds there’s still a lot of work to be done. BRINC’s instructional committee hopes to pilot the first cross-district e-learning class in the upcoming school year.
In addition to Capital and Polytech, other districts participating in BRINC are: Appoquinimink, Brandywine, Caesar Rodney, Colonial, New Castle Vo-Tech, Indian River, and Red Clay.
