Date: April 16th, 2013 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
We received a very generous donation from a Steve Linder, his company gave us a Hitachi interactive whiteboard with mobile stand and a short-throw projector with mount. A considerable piece of equipment, apparently it wasn’t large enough for their needs. We just picked it up over the Spring break and will be deciding who to give it to shortly.
Also over Spring break we managed to get the library lab ports rewired and the whole area rearranged, the ports are now safely out of the way of chair legs and there’s considerable more space for staff and students to circulate around the computer area. The Library staff have expressed their appreciation of the changes.
The Intermediate and Middle Schools are now in the midst of preparing students for the online version of the MSP, running the students through the practice tests the State provides. As always there are a few “quirks” to the software that get discovered, but that’s the purpose of the preparation and practice. The students still overall respond favorably to taking it electronically and for some of them this’ll be their third year of taking it online.
Our new website is running on the same type of software as our Sips program (both are Perl based Catalyst applications), although being newer the website is on a later version and a different database. In order to streamline both software maintenance and be able to bring these together on the same hardware we’re now updating the software libraries for Sips and migrating it to the new database. This unification also allows us to move bits of functionality if needed, for example our online student registration form will be moved from Sips over to our website where it logically makes more sense for it to be.