Mon Nov 23 2009, 7:00pm
District Meeting Room Portable
Regular Meeting

REPORTS TO THE BOARD

Tech Report

Date: November 18, 2009
To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary

We have just rolled out a new mobile cart to the High School English department, and early reports are very positive. We're reusing the old lockable metal cart from our previous mobile cart (which while popular was plagued with problems, bad batteries, poor wireless, damaged/lost equipment etc) and fitted it out with 32 new Netbooks and high quality Cisco wireless access points, which we're optimistic will function well together. This will only be for the HS English department as they are the biggest users of the library for computer time, thereby freeing up the library a bit for other folks to use. I'm also hoping to instill more of a feeling of "ownership" so that a smaller group of users will take better care of it. If it does prove to be a sustainable success we will look at rolling out more at a departmental level.

Our new Exchange server is up and functioning for testing. We have a preliminary account sending and receiving successfully, now we need to test remote access through the web and smart phones. Once we have all that in place we can move people onto it. The hardware for our original Exchange server (an old Dell server out of warranty) gasped its last breath and died just a few weeks ago, but we were able to juggle some of our virtual servers to other hardware and move the disks to another server chassis. I'm glad the new one is almost ready though!

It's a Tech planning year this year. Our last 3 year plan runs out next June, so I'll be presenting a new plan for the Board's approval before then. I'm organizing meetings at each of the buildings to get input into how we continue to move forward in our goal of integrating Technology into the instruction within the District. I'll report more as this proceeds.