WEST WARWICK — If Emily Kindschy had to find an English paper in her backpack, “it would be a scary thing,” she says.

“With tangible items, I’m not very organized,” said the honors student at West Warwick High School, “but with the computer, I am very organized.”

Emily is in luck. During the past school year, much of her coursework has moved online.

“I don’t have to hand the English teacher an actual copy” of a paper, she explained. She simply uploads it from an individual computer, at home or at school, to a network where her teacher may read it and grade it.

At the end of Emily’s senior year, an entire portfolio of her work will be available online for teachers to evaluate.

The electronic portfolio — a collection of written work, mathematics, photos and even video clips — is one of three key tools that schools may use to determine whether students can apply the skills they have learned in the classroom over their entire high school careers. That ability is now crucial to a high school diploma in Rhode Island.

About a dozen Rhode Island school districts, including West Warwick, Providence, Cranston, East Providence and Woonsocket, have chosen the electronic portfolio to assess students’ proficiency in various topics.

With the advent of digital portfolios, accessed through the Internet, students and teachers click their way from one Web page to another, increasing the demand on computer servers maintained by the public schools’ nonprofit Internet provider, the Rhode Island Network for Educational Technology.

All that clicking has strained the system’s capacity, until the past year, when RINET worked with the schools to change data processing so that the schools get more bang for the same Internet buck.

Sharon Hussey, executive director of RINET, said the changes in the system build on advances in computer chip technology that allow users to store and retrieve information in smaller and smaller spaces without the danger of overheating the works.

More and more, information technology experts everywhere are adding chips inside computer servers and dividing them into compartments used for different purposes.

This compartmentalization, or “virtualization,” has reduced redundant operations and increased efficiencies, Hussey said.

Data requests from an individual school, which once took a circuitous route, now go directly to RINET’s main hub of servers in the Foundry complex in Providence and get routed to the appropriate secondary cluster of servers.

The Rhode Island Electronic Portfolio System, for example, lives on servers maintained by RINET in the data center at the University of Rhode Island.

Because a smaller number of servers can do more work, administrators need less time to maintain large networks. The machines use less electric power. And the schools’ techno-dollars stretch farther.

Hussey said the Rhode Island Department of Education spends just under $4 million a year on the data lines that connect all the public schools and libraries.

For the same amount of money, which comes from a surcharge on commercial telephone lines, these same data lines are handling 40 percent more traffic today than they did a year ago, Hussey said.

In Portsmouth, the school district has taken the same approach at the local level that RINET has used statewide, stretching a $175,000 technology budget twice as far as it did the previous year.

West Warwick was the first of about 30 districts that has changed over to RINET’s new virtualized network.

Technology director James Monti immediately noticed the difference.

A half-hour video, which until then had taken 15 minutes to download, came up for viewing in 3 to 5 minutes, he said.

In general, Rhode Island school districts have improved their use of technology during the last year, according to the annual Technology Counts study done by Education Week, which in this category hiked the state’s grade from an F to an A- in 2009.

West Warwick is “ahead of the curve” among Rhode Island schools in its use of technology, according to Holly Walsh, instructional technology education specialist for the state Department of Education.

Among themselves, teachers use video for professional development, recording themselves as they try new instructional methods with their classes and putting the results online, where their colleagues can have a look.

History teacher Lisa Flanders routinely posts assignments online. Each student may access the shared class space on the Internet from any computer, at home or at school, with an individually assigned password.

Flanders also has made liberal use of video in her classes, with Monti, the technology director, supplying students with inexpensive “flip” video cameras.

In Flanders’ class, sophomore Kate Goodson presented her research on events leading to the Civil War in the form of a video of an interview that might have taken place with a candidate for public office in the 1856 election.

“I can remember what people said better from the videos instead of just reading it,” said Megan Savage, a classmate of Goodson’s.

James Lynch, a sophomore, summed up the end result of the improved Internet access:

“It allows unparalleled immersion. It becomes a first-person experience,” he said.

gmacris@projo.com