Technology & Innovation

Empowering students with the skills of technology and innovation amplifies their voice and their ability to make change today and in the future. Educating students with our mission in mind means equipping them with the powerful tools of technology fluency and an innovator’s stance to communicate and create, to think deeply and explore, with their values and community in mind.

Stone Ridge’s vision for technology and innovation is rooted in our Sacred Heart Goals; we are committed to developing learners and leaders who are skilled, ethical, and purposeful innovators. Our program builds foundational technology skills like technical adaptability, problem-solving, process management, and computational and systems thinking. We adopt an integrated approach to build interdisciplinary connections across the curriculum so that technology and innovation skills transfer across contexts, year over year.

Technology in the Classroom

All Middle and Upper School students are issued an Apple MacBook Air for the 1-to-1 Laptop program.
Students in Grades K–4 are in the 1-to-1 iPad program.
Students in Pre-Kindergarten have a classroom set of iPads.
All Pre-K–12 classrooms are equipped with an Epson Brightlink interactive projector and many are equipped with an Apple TV or Chromecast to support wireless casting for students and teachers.

AI Tools for Learning

Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart recognizes the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in education. The teacher-student relationship and a classroom culture of thinking can never be replaced by an AI tool, and a Sacred Heart education is definitively holistic and human-centered. Within that context, and with our mission and Core Beliefs about AI for Teaching and Learning at the fore, AI provides supportive resources that enhance the academic program and student experience.

Stone Ridge’s Core Beliefs about AI for Teaching and Learning

We believe that the use of AI at Stone Ridge for teaching and learning must be rooted in the Sacred Heart Goals and Criteria; it must align with and extend the realization of our Sacred Heart mission.
We believe that AI is dynamic, adaptive, and increasingly powerful and we will need to adopt a learner’s stance and a growth mindset as it evolves.
We believe that AI has immediate and ongoing implications for how we think of and approach teaching and learning; and that AI has a place in our curriculum and instruction, inspiring a transformative and inclusive educational experience.
We believe that we must use a well-formed conscience to evaluate, anticipate, and reflect on the impact and ethical considerations of AI on humans, humanity, and God’s creation.

Flint: Our Student AI Tool for the Classroom

Students at Stone Ridge use Flint as their classroom AI tool. Flint is a powerful tool built on the LLM backbone of Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DALL-E that has been designed as a platform for teachers and students of all ages. Flint allows the extensive use of multimedia formats, is considered highly accurate and up-to-date, includes a powerful calculation engine, can graph equations on 2D or 3D planes to visualize math problems, and supports text-to-speech and speech-to-text in 50+ languages.

Teachers have used Flint to support learning across the curriculum, from generating album cover art based on ancient Mayan history, to applying grammatical skills in an AI “Run-On Repair Shop”, to practicing math strategies with instant feedback and adaptive responses. Stone Ridge teachers carefully consider how AI can support student learning and build student AI skills.

Prioritizing student privacy and safety

We selected Flint deliberately because it is fully FERPA, COPPA, and GDPR compliant, and it does not use student interactions to train its AI models. Unlike many consumer-facing tools, Flint is designed to be safe and appropriate for students of all ages—including those under 13—without violating any terms of service. That gives us confidence that students can explore AI in a structured, teacher-moderated environment that puts their safety and privacy first. Flint also maintains a student-appropriate tone and flags inappropriate replies from students so that teachers can stay in the loop to ensure healthy interactions.

Preserving academic integrity

When students use Flint in the classroom, teachers have insight into their interactions and have designed activities that guide their work. This means that teachers have included parameters about how much help the AI tool can offer, what resources and strategies students use within the activity, and can review the interaction in full. Flint’s platform makes it easy for students to interact with AI within the guardrails of the learning environment that serve the lesson and learning goals, and easy for teachers to get a birds-eye view of student thinking.

Resources for Parental Management Technologies

While parental management technologies can be helpful in supporting young people as they find balance in their digital lives, the best parental manager of technology use is you. Your guidance in the process of navigating digital spaces will help your child build healthy strategies for approaching challenges online and can establish a dialogue that will support them as their digital lives grow. This resource is intended to supplement your family conversation about using technology.

You may choose to manage your child’s access to online content, phone calls/texts, screen time, and more using parental management technologies. Stone Ridge does not endorse any products, but this information from Common Sense Media may be helpful in deciding what works for your family:

Home Network

OpenDNS Home Network Shield - Content filtering
Comcast Parental Controls - Time limits, scheduled pause, content filtering
Verizon Parental Controls - Scheduled pause, content filtering

App Management

Google Family Link App - Scheduled pause, content filtering, restrict Youtube content, view activity, and locate a device.
Netflix Parental Controls - Set maturity levels, block shows, access viewing history
Amazon Kids - Content filtering, time limits, age filters, access viewing history
Youtube Restricted Mode - Content filtering

Mobile Phones

iPhone Screen Time - Screen time reports and time limits
iPhone Parental Controls - Content filtering, purchase controls, privacy controls
Android Digital Wellbeing - Screen time reports, app management, time limits
Verizon Smart Family - View online activity, manage calls and texts, filter content, scheduled pause

Overall Management (including social media use)

Subscriptions:

Tips on managing phones from Common Sense Media

At school we manage filtering content over our network. We also use Bark for Schools to monitor content on Gmail and Google Drive.

Innovation in STEM

STEM. Robotics. Internships.

Technology and Innovation programs in each division build students’ STEM skills and support their identity as empowered makers. Through their Lower School explorations with Innovation in the Social Studies curriculum and integrated into their classroom projects, through their Middle School Systems and Engineering seminars in mechanical and electrical engineering, and into an Upper School program that offers a range of courses that begin in Grade 9 with the Explorations in Technology and Design seminar, growing students in the practices of innovation is a throughline across their Stone Ridge education. Stone Ridge provides a variety of additional opportunities in clubs like Hacking Club and Girls Who Code, in the STEM Certificate program, and through community spaces for supported tinkering like the Makerspace and Digital Fabrication Lab.