Kiel Area School District in Wisconsin is the ‘little engine that could’. A small, rural district, Kiel is ‘large in vision and vast in technology’ according to its nominator.  Kiel has accomplished many important outcomes despite limitations of time and funds. They have a state-of-the-art distance learning lab, video production labs, staff and student electronic portfolios data and curriculum warehousing, wifeless technology and paperless school board meetings.

Kiel has also had a national focus on its online learning program to ensure that its results can be transferred to other districts and has created a joint computer lab for use by recently dislocated workers and our students with a local technical college.

Among the many valuable programs at Kiel, Build Your Own Curriculum (BYOC) is a web-based curriculum program, which provides teachers a framework to organize their curriculum, instruction, and assessment. BYOC provides a view of courses and curriculum by state and/or local standards, through user-defined teaching objectives. 

This flexibility plus anytime/anywhere access by parents to student information make Kiel a truly “big” district that wins the CoSN 2007 Award for educational technology innovation.

-- Kevin Hogan, Executive Editor for Scholastic Administr@tor Magazine