Date: December 14th, 2010 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
Although the Winter break is short we're still planning a few projects while everyone is out of the District. We're in the process of upgrading our switch capacity both in the High School and the Primary School. Just before the Thanksgiving break (when school was out) we substituted a larger switch into the stack in the High School, and now over Christmas we'll replace another one and then put the two that came out in at the Primary School for additional capacity there. The poor quality of some of our older cabling is coming to light, so some work is going to have to be done to improve that in the medium to long term. We'll also be replacing old computers and adding additional ones for Richard Findlay in the High School, and several teachers at WIS, all with new thin clients.
Most of the equipment for the new Yale laptop cart has arrived now. We're having some problems around our imaging method and security lockdown, brought about because new hardware running Windows requires Windows 7 (not everything has drivers for XP now), and not everything in our infrastructure is ready for that yet, but we're working through it. We hope that technical issues being resolved and the weather not being too bad we'll be able to get that in place over the break as well.
While I've been using Google Apps for about 6 months now (and think quite highly of it), some of our High School English teachers are just now venturing into it with their students. Candice Lindsay and Jeff Flanagan are also in the process of taking some training on how to run Tech professional development, and one of the topics they will cover with staff is Google Docs. Candice has already spoken quite highly of Google Apps and thinks it holds potential value for our students, especially in terms of the ease with which they could access their work both in the District and when they're outside. While I'm certainly not pushing on this front, I am interested in what our educators make of it and whether a gradual adoption takes place. It's certainly something that fits in with our "lighter" tech approach of thin-clients and possibly soon tablets and the like. Aaron Blackwelder told me that a student of his had written his paper on his iPhone because he preferred typing on that, and it was a good paper apparently!
It seems as though the reports generated in Sips for the first trimester Math assessments have proved to be useful in the collaborative meetings that took place. Mo Anderson, Malinda Huddleston, Asha Riley and myself had a meeting this week on how to improve what we have so far, for better accessibility to data, better handling of certain types of data and more reporting. Evergreen School District have also expressed an interest in our system and I demoed it for some of their assessment folks last week.