Exploring new ways to develop leadership, the Round Rock High School JROTC class has used recently acquired classroom technology to help enhance its curriculum and character-based lessons.

This year, the JROTC class earned the distinction of being named a Next Generation Digital Classroom, which provides instructors with additional technology to enhance their lessons and give students the opportunity to facilitate learning with easily accessible resources. Through the allocation of extra resources, the program has been able to add on new initiatives that not only help staff see positive results but strengthen the community of the program.

The class has started a weekly screencast, which allows student leaders within the organization to speak to the rest of the students through a video broadcast, Senior Military Instructor Major Jackie Schiller said. Students come together each week to produce the segments with the technology available in their classroom.

“Through the implementation of our weekly screencast, we have been able to give our students the opportunity to further develop their leadership skills,” Schiller said. “These leaders are able to provide the same message across the board and keep everyone in the organization informed and dedicated to achieving the same goals.”

Along with the addition of their weekly broadcast, the technology is also being utilized to transform the class’ character-based curriculum. Part of their curriculum this year was to teach students about leadership through the heroic actions of others, specifically Medal of Honor recipients. Students learned about the obstacles they faced, how they overcame them and were able to conduct further research with their classroom technology.

“The technology was helpful during this project because you could learn at your own pace and understand how each recipient earned their Medal of Honor,” JROTC Sophomore Nathan Bassett said. “I feel like I’m learning more because it gives us a wider variety of topics to research that we may not have been able to access without the technology. I love the experience we get from doing that.”

With access to additional resources, both students and instructors have noticed a change in classroom engagement.

“It’s given us the resources that we didn’t have before,” Schilling said. “Our students are more engaged.”