First Posted: 5/13/2014
Lackawanna Trail High School will be exploring opportunities offered through MSN, school principal Dr. Mark Murphy said during the May 12 board meeting.
Murphy announced that if Trail uses Bing as their search engine, rewards can be attributed to schools and/or school buildings.
“For every time you search a term on Bing and you’re a registered user, your school accumulates rewards points,” he said. “Usually, one search, one point, although on some days, there are bonus days, one search two points, one search three points.
Murphy said that when a school reaches a milestone of rewards points, it can acquire technology in the form of surface notebooks for a particular department.
Murphy mentioned that he first talked to Trail’s librarian Kelly Hopkins, who was in search of money for surface notebooks for her library.
“I asked her if she was interested in this (rewards program),” he said. “She got in touch with them (MSN), and has the materials to do some advertisements.”
Murphy contacted Kristen Kurpis (instructional technology specialist) and Ed Gaidula (district technology coordinator), and asked if they would be interested in putting the rewards program in Trail’s computers for the technology department.
“There was some hesitancy to switch those computers over a mandatory status,” he said.
Murphy said Gaidula didn’t want every computer to change over because he thought that certain teachers already have references for their search engines.
The next initiative, Murphy said, would be to advertise to the public, which would be done by summer mailings about how to register home devices to accumulate points for Trail’s elementary or high school.
“They (points) do accumulate very quickly, especially when you have all the students in the high school library using that (Bing) as their search engine,” he said.
Elementary principal Tania Stoker and Murphy discussed the idea to the faculty in the elementary center.
“The PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) is also trying to look at means for having more money or more technology they can bring to the elementary center,” she said. “So, we had discussions with them as well, and we’ll be putting it out in a newsletter.”
In other business, Ned Clarke, announced in his board member’s report that the discipline committee, in which he is the chairman, will meet with the public on June 2 at 7 p.m. to discuss items pertaining to school discipline.
“We’re asking for the public’s input but we also would like to have it pertain to the current handbooks that are in place now, not the things that have happened in the past or incidents that we had in the past,” he said.
The meeting will have a sign-in sheet and a basic time limit for people to speak.