Date: April 16th, 2012 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
Over Spring break we made the long put-off changes to our Active Directory structure, upgrading our original Domain controller to MS Server 2008 R2 in line with our secondary server, and demoting an older machine that had come to the end of its reliable life. Were also starting to go around all the desktop computers to switch on their built in wake-on-lan features which enable the computer to be woken remotely. The idea behind this is that we can set more aggressive policies around computers going to sleep or shutting down at the end of the day (to save power) and still wake them in the middle of the night periodically to run updates.
The main thing occupying us this month is the MSP, this year were running kids from 5th to 8th grade through the online versions. Weve just been greatly helped out by a donation of laptops from USNR, without which we wouldnt have met the Intermediate Schools goal of getting an extra mobile lab of 30 computers in their library. Thats now in place and so theyll be running the kids through there this week for some final practice before next week.
Last month we finished up our State Technology survey for this year, and the overall count of just under 1,000 computers across the District is actually fairly similar to last year. After several years of expansion on the student access side weve put the brakes on that for the time being as we focus on renewing machines on the staff side and some other infrastructure pieces.
Below Ive included the summary of the staff tech proficiency and integration results. We seem to have held steady compared to last year. Our Tech PD generally revolves around short proficiency trainings and more in depth voluntary sessions around integration (like our annual Moodle bootcamp), understandably I think our main District PD focus has been more on academic areas. Still, with the introduction of Google Apps we might see a slight increase in the tech integration numbers over the next few years.