Date: June 21st, 2011 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
There's a seeming last minute rush on right now to hold meetings and arrange things for next year before folks disappear completely for the summer, but I do hope they go soon to leave us to get on with it all!
In all seriousness we have some rooms to move in various building mostly due to staffing changes, but not as much as some previous years. One of the biggest headaches will be moving all of Kim Knudson's whiteboard technology up to Yale. That equipment isn't really designed to move easily once it's built in but she has done so much work with it this year that it only seems right to have her continue with her students up there. Kyle Niekamp will also move into the room up there with the existing older whiteboard so I expect the two of them will very much support and encourage each other in the technology use, it will be great for the students up there.
We are going to be upgrading some of our oldest student and staff computers over the summer. Most of the student machines will be replaced with thin clients, but some of our older staff computers will also move into being very adequate student machines, as we run less intensive software on them generally. It seems as though the lions share of the new/extra student computers will be going to the Intermediate School as we've had by far the most requests from them. Their use of the computers with their students has really dramatically increased over the last couple of years.
We'll be updating software where appropriate, we have the new Microsoft Office 2010 waiting for Staff, and we'll complete our roll out of the new version of Firefox for everyone. We'll be performing a few server upgrades and reshuffles to make the most of existing equipment. I hope we have time to try upgrading one of our domain controllers to Server 2008, something we had planned last summer but never had time for. Additionally we have some wiring repairs lined up for the High School, four rooms have broken or problematic network connections that will be repaired.
Internally to the tech department we're finishing off an upgrade to our management of DNS and Radius (DNS tells every computer the "address" of other computers and websites while Radius controls our security in terms of what is allowed on the network) and switching to a new version of DNS. We're also moving to a new helpdesk software which is much more configurable and nicer to use than our previous one. The biggest advantage that I see so far is that we can set up separate "queues" for general helpdesk, website, sips, telephones etc and different people can monitor these (with some overlap obviously). For our department and one or two other folks it means we can all be in the same system but we don't necessarily get emails that are irrelevant to us (a sure way to train folks to stop reading emails altogether!).
Sips will be getting quite a bit of attention over the summer. Essentially the Middle and High Schools will be beginning to make use of it, for tracking new data and, for the Middle School at least, making use of the data already collected on next years 7th grade. Some additional reports will be generated, more sections will be included and we're working towards a "dashboard" for teachers to get an overview of the kids in their class with current data. We're also investigating option to bring TEAM and a possible Lewis River Academy in under the same system, improving the connection to School Master and the State.