Ednetics have been into the high school the last couple of weeks to swap out the cabling for the classroom AV systems. It should have been shielded ethernet cabling, and it turned out that their installers had not used shielded in most of the locations. Swapping that out in a few troublesome spots did appear to fix the problems we were having and so Ednetics came in and fixed the rest at no cost to us. Needless to say I’m glad we’ve managed to resolve this.
WCAP/SBA testing began in earnest at the Intermediate School last week. Tech staff are there whenever teachers start out on testing for the first couple of times to lend a hand and make sure they feel confident with the technology. Apart from a few very minor issues things have gone very smoothly.
After the various background updates to the website we finally got to school front pages. The primary, intermediate, middle and high schools all now have the rotating carousels of our news stories on them. This is really made possible by the work of Eric Jacobson, keeping fresh and relevant stories up front.And we are moving forwards with getting Chromebooks for all classroom teachers. This was something the high school did at the beginning of this year, and while I was a little skeptical to begin with it seems to have been a very positive thing. It gives staff the tools to work in a much more flexible and collaborative manner (something the Google tools are all about), and I think it helps teachers to experience efficiency and productivity gains, and increase their confidence in using these tools with their students.