Growing with Technology: A Purposeful Approach to Digital Learning

At Westside School, our approach to technology evolves alongside our students and the world around them. This year, we are strengthening that work across all grade levels, focusing on using digital tools intentionally to support learning. Students learn to use technology thoughtfully and purposefully, building the skills to create, solve problems, think critically, and navigate an increasingly digital world with confidence and responsibility. 

Throughout their time at Westside School, students build digital fluency and computational thinking, seek information and media literacy, practice digital citizenship, and evaluate AI literacy to think critically, responsibly, and ethically. These experiences develop alongside our students as they move through Early Learning, Lower School, and Middle School.

Technology is intentionally integrated into the classroom experience in age-appropriate ways. In Early Learning, technology begins with imagination, wonder, and discovery. While teachers and students use limited technology in the classroom, they emphasize types of technology through play, building, and exploration inspired by the world around them. Students may use the classroom makerspace to create “cell phones” from recycled materials to incorporate mobile payment into an imaginative coffee shop. Even without a screen, students are beginning to explore how technology exists in the world around them.

In Lower School, students move from imagination into exploration. As students grow, they begin developing the foundational skills needed to use digital tools thoughtfully and independently. By fourth grade, students start to use Chromebooks to practice digital literacy skills in typing and research. They apply these skills to more advanced projects, like recording persuasive podcasts about energy. After-school enrichment classes provide additional opportunities to code, build, and invent with tools like micro:bit to bring their ideas to life. These experiences help students begin to see technology not simply as something they consume, but as a tool they can use to research, communicate, create, and solve problems. 

In Middle School, students move from exploration to application. Building on the skills students developed in Lower School, Chromebooks are introduced as a one-to-one program in 5th grade. A fifth-grade foundations course emphasizes responsible technology use and helps students develop the habits and skills they need to use their devices effectively for learning. Throughout Middle School, students use digital tools for research, collaboration, communication, creation, and increasingly complex academic work. Seventh and eighth grade exploratory courses provide opportunities to deepen their fluency in computer science and computational design, music tech, and stop-motion animation, allowing them to become programmers, engineers, inventors, and creators.

This year, our Technology Department will share stories of technology in action through student creations and classroom projects spotlighted in school communications and social media. As we continue to adapt our program to an increasingly technology-driven world, we remain focused on ensuring technology enhances great teaching and learning rather than driving it. Our goal is for students to leave Westside with the skills, confidence, and judgment to use technology thoughtfully, creatively, responsibly, and with purpose.

Written by Michael Le, Director of Technology