During the summer, My Big Campus, an online learning management system of which Lake Central has become accompanied with, will be terminating their IP address.

“We won’t tremendously be affected. We’ll be having a learning curve as we entertain a new learning management system for our educators and students, but it will be a small learning curve because a high percentage of our teachers and students are familiar with My Big Campus and how it functions. The login features the postings of calendar features and knowing that will make it much easier to transition into a new system that would function ideally very similar to My Big Campus. It would just have a different name,” Mr. Robin Tobias, Principal, said.

My Big Campus has been used by Lake Central staff and students for the past two years. On the website, classes can have discussions, schoolwork can be assigned and classroom resources such as notes and calendars can be accessed.

“[The main purpose for having a learning management system is having] simple ways to go paperless as much as possible. That’s obviously a cost factor, but it is also a society transition where we have a lot of companies, a lot of businesses, a lot of financial corporations and employers and college institutions doing a lot of paperless work with people. We need to make sure our students are educated on that process and are familiar with accessing documents, information online and not just accessing it, but managing it and being able to create personal portfolios. That’s an important process we need to make sure our students have in high school prior to exiting this building. For post high-school studies, many universities use some sort of management system such as Moodle, Canvas and Blackboard. It just makes sense as a high school to operate just as a university does and make our students feel comfortable with that process as well as our teachers. We have a wireless capability now throughout the building so we need to take advantage of that technology for our instructional purposes as much as possible,” Mr. Tobias said.

Students and teachers have been told to transition over from Lake Central’s website onto My Big Campus as the main resource for online access. Both teachers and students will be affected by the termination of My Big Campus.

“[The transition] doesn’t bother me because operating systems change all the time. It’s a pain that I have to upload stuff, but you have to get used to it, because I wind up uploading new information anyways,” Mrs. Roberta Harnish, Science, said.

Though Lake Central will no longer have access My Big Campus, administrators are looking for another system to keep teachers and students online.

“Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle are the three that we’re looking at, which is nice because Canvas and Blackboard are both used at the college level. If you’re using them here at school, when you go to IU or Purdue, that’s what they use,” Mrs. Myra Lolkema, technology trainer, said.