Academic Technology in Upper School

Technology Services and Tools
Students in Grades 9–12 participate in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program, in which they supply a laptop of their own choosing in accordance with school technical specifications. All students and their parents or guardians are required to sign a technology Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) at the beginning of each year.

Every Upper School classroom is equipped with a large, state-of-the-art interactive display or video projector.  Two dedicated computer labs provide resources for programming, robotics, and other creative applications of technology.  

WIS also maintains strict age-based policies related to the use of Artificial Intelligence and other technological aspects of academic integrity. Upper School students may use either of two dedicated generative Artificial Intelligence platforms for academic work, FlintK12 and Gemini.  Flint is an education-specific tool that is specifically designed for teaching and learning. It promotes guided Socratic inquiry rather than providing cut-and-dry answers to questions. Gemini is permitted as part of the school’s Google Education Workspace ecosystem and carries strict data safeguards. No student or school data is used to train either platform’s database and model, so personal information is secure.

Digital Citizenship
Students in the Upper School participate in specific digital citizenship workshops that take place outside their regular classes, either in dedicated seminars or in advisory meetings. These sessions address increasingly complex topics like ethical technology use and critical thinking skills that can be applied across the complicated digital landscapes students inhabit. For instance, recent Grade 9 seminars included a cautionary review of how AI chatbots are programmed to seem humanlike, while lacking real emotion, and the students also explored practical demonstrations of how AI can produce biased results.