Technology at Augustine

At Augustine School, we believe that educators and teachers have an important role in helping students grow in a God-honoring and effective use of digital technologies such as electronic computing, media, and information technology.

Technology is always changing; its possible uses are too numerous to be exhaustively catalogued in a list of rules. And so in the classroom we provide a values-based approach to guide the use of technology. Below we have listed just a few of the principles that form our use of technology in the classroom:

• The Priority of Teacher-Student Relationship: We affirm that true education and person formation is grounded in the relationship of teacher and student and is much more than the mere transfer of information.
• The Importance of Focusing on students: In an age in which personal attention and attentiveness is giving way to distraction and impersonal interaction, we wish to model for students and parents what it means to really give a person our full attention.
• The Preference for Words Over Images in Education: While images can be very powerful, they are also more easily consumed and generally require less training to process. Understanding words, concepts, and ideas requires active attention, dialogue, and reflection. Therefore, we believe oral and written language should be the focus of education. We want our students to be comfortable using language , and that means we have to give it a certain priority.
• The Importance of the Beautiful (As Opposed To The Merely Attractive or Pleasing): We resist the urge of our culture to make things superficially attractive to children by covering them with a veneer of pop culture, flashy images, or catchy tunes. We believe it is a great calling to help students learn to appreciate that which is enduringly and inherently beautiful.

Above all, it is expected that students will exemplify Christian virtues in their use of technology - love, holiness, honesty, integrity, kindness, and more.