Date: January 22nd, 2014 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
We received another large donation of thin client hardware from Camas School District, around 200 units in all! This will be extremely valuable in our quest to replace our existing Windows XP machines this year so we’re gradually rolling them out as we replace some monitors and expand our server capacity slightly.
The High School went through a collaborative process to decide what to do with some extra budget money they had this year and decided to spend it on technology. Specifically they chose a Google Chromebook cart after hearing of the English department’s experiences with it and the small trials going on in Shari Conditt’s class and HS SPED. Hopefully that will all be together in the next couple of weeks, but rather than just put it out there for use John, Dan, Asha and myself are trying to put in place a small process to both support the teachers that use it as well as challenge them to think more deeply on how the use of technology will make them more efficient and effective. I’m looking forward to seeing how this takes root.
The switch over to Cascade Networks for our connection to the Intermediate School took longer than initially thought with them having to reconfigure certain things on their network to accommodate our requests. In the end though they have been extremely responsive to our needs and we’ve ended up getting almost all the capabilities we had with our Eman connection for a fraction of the price and much higher peace of mind.
Finally it’s the time of year that we start to prepare for online State testing as we begin to test their software in our environment and push it out initially for staff to evaluate and then later for students to practice on. This year we’ll be running the older MSP software for the Intermediate School and Middle School science, and the new SBAC software for the Middle School English and Math. Slightly more of a challenge for us but I’m always happy that we get to take part in the early trials of this to be able to be part of the formative process on the tech side of things.