Date: November 17th, 2010 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary Math Assessments in Sips You're aware that in one way or another the District has been working towards energy savings, whether it's Bill's work with the lighting, the District buying more efficient vehicles or the increased use of low power consumption thin clients to meet some of our computer needs. The next part of this for the Tech department is getting a better handle on our "fat" clients (or regular Desktop machines), of which we still have a lot in the District. Up until now we have insisted that people keep these switched on at night so that we can run updates/upgrades and virus scans in off hours. This helps keep the computers more responsive during working hours and also means we can always access those computers in remote spots that someone may not have actually used for a while. The obvious disadvantage to this is the constant energy consumption, mitigated somewhat by monitors falling asleep. Our thin clients are already shutting down at night automatically (as all updates happen on the central server, nothing on the clients), and now we're working on scheduling down time for all our computers and, more importantly from a operational point of view, making sure we have the ability to "wake up" computers centrally. This will mean that we can allow machines to shutdown after a couple of hours of inactivity and still bring them up at night to run updates and scans. I'm also working this year on phasing out as many of the old CRT monitors we still have (pretty much just on student machines now) and replacing them with LCD models which consume far less energy. Speaking of virus scans, a number of District computers were tagged by a virus a few weeks ago. A reconfiguration of our mail gateway lead to .zip files being allowed in through our email, and a few of our staff clicked on something in spam email to run whatever it was, and their machines were infected. Our anti-virus detected it but was unable to remove it, so a we had to run around for a day or two disinfecting a dozen computers or so. Needless to say .zip files are blocked again! On the whole our anti-virus software has been effective, quite a few intrusions are detected and most are dealt with automatically by the software. We are experiencing another price for this though in the form of reduced performance on our older Staff computers. The anti-virus software demands so much of the computer's resources that everything else slows down somewhat, an unfortunate side-effect of using Windows on anything but the latest and greatest hardware. On the thin client front we've just purchased 10 units to test out from Portland based CTL. They sell a flat panel LCD monitor with a small Atom powered thin-client attached directly to the back of the monitor. It looks very neat and is very easy for us to install, so initially at least we're very pleased with them. We'll deploy these and probably get a few more and then see how they perform in the longer term. In Sips news, Asha and I just introduced the new section for teachers to enter scores for the District math assessments they've just had most of the elementary students take. The online forms make data entry pretty quick and painless, and then the data is converted to averages and total for analysis by Asha and her team. I'm awaiting feedback but assuming no news is good news!