Date: March 19th, 2014 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
Our (second) High School chromebook cart is now up and running and teachers have been using it without reporting any problems (the English department started the year with a new Chromebook cart). I’ve yet to get some feedback from the teachers on their initial experiences with it but I will be asking them soon as it seems likely that they will feature much more in the future. Our initial entry into the world of Chromebooks has been fairly modest, we have almost 100 of them now, but I recently found out that Ridgefield brought in 500 of them this year and Battleground 1,500, and in many more districts they’re catching on like wildfire! It seems that the inexpensive devices which are relatively easy to manage, combined with Google’s online services (as well as the rest of the Internet) have really hit a chord with schools.
The start of the SBAC online field tests have been delayed by a week which cut right across when the High School had planned to put their 11th grade through it (this week during the HSPE). The consortium cited concerns about quality assurance and so needed to delay and I’m sure it wasn’t done lightly. I don’t yet know how the High School plans to reschedule.
Finally we have been pushing hard on the Windows XP transition front. It’s just a month until XP is officially “End of life” and we certainly won’t have every last XP computer out by them (or even this year), but we are making a lot of progress as we upgrade those computers that can run Windows 7 and redistribute them to locations that have a need for Microsoft software, and replace the rest with thin clients from our Camas donation. We started out this year needing to replace hundreds of these computers and I would imagine that’ll be down to just dozens by the summer.