Date: April 23rd, 2014 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
We are in the final countdown to testing now, both the MSP and SBAC. The Intermediate and Middle Schools have been taking students through the practice sessions and we have discovered some problems around the audio on the new SBAC, but that’s why this year is just a “field test”! This week we’re putting an extra temporary computer lab into the Intermediate School library to increase their testing capacity and next week we’ll be live with the real thing.
Sips has been used to track math unit and interim assessment data for some time now, but with the extra work that’s going into the Algebra 1 course from the math team we’re now in discussions on how to take that to the next level. Really connecting the data points to specific common core standards will allow us to scan at a greater level of detail which concepts the students have mastered and those they haven’t. Combining this with the extensive question bank that is being developed by Kari Debower will allow teachers to probe specific student on specific areas just when needed, so thought is going into tying all this together and potentially putting it in a form that can be shared with others as this is now an OER.
We are also currently crawling through the plans for the new High School room by room to determine exactly what the tech needs are, from simply numbers of computers, printers, projectors etc (which is straight forwards) to the kind of switch infrastructure we’ll need in the background to support the network. There are still some unknowns but we’re closing in and getting some cost estimates along the way. It’s certainly a privilege to have such a well designed clean slate to work with!