Technology & Device Policy & Information

Seton Hall Preparatory School is a “Bring your own device” (BYOD) school, but we neither expect nor require students to bring their devices – they are merely for preference. We assume that the students have a family computer at home on which they can perform research and complete projects for their classes, but they have access before school, during lunch, during Activity Periods, and after school to our iMac and Windows Labs. We are a Microsoft 365 school so students can download the full Office Suite onto 5 devices, but they can also store all their work in OneDrive. Therefore, students can be completely mobile with their productivity. They could do some work at home and some at school and because most teachers accept digital submission of projects, students do not need access to a printer at home. (If they need to print any work for class, they can do so from one of our labs.) Information regarding the Office Suite download and using personal devices to print with our networked printers will become available during orientation.

If students find it more convenient to have a device in school, they can bring in their laptops, tablets, or phones and connect to our network which has enterprise class infrastructure with redundant Internet connections. Students will be allowed to use a laptop in most of your classes to take notes, but we do not recommend this.   Educational research shows that students learn less and earn lower grades when they take notes using a computer as compared to when using a pen and paper. Please see these two articles from Harvard and Scientific American.

There is no need for a student to purchase a laptop to thrive at Seton Hall Prep, but if he does, he can purchase any device that he is already comfortable using. We simply recommend that the device is a mid-level model with average specifications. There is no need to get something top-of-the-line.