In the last month we got staff Chromebooks out to teachers at all the schools except the high school (they already had theirs!). These were well received and I’ve already attended collaboration meetings where they were in use and have seen staff carrying them out of other meetings. I think this has come at the right time with our use of collaboration tools between staff and with students. They will also have them over the summer for any trainings they attend.
Testing is over for another year, and apart from a few small technical glitches, the online system performed very well. We need to expand our wireless a little in the middle and intermediate schools to comfortably handle the concentration of wireless clients when all the classes in a particular wing are testing at once. This year we “patched” this with some temporary roving access points (we moved them around as the testing schedule went on!), by next year we’ll have permanent APs in place.
And now we’re diving into the summer, some new hardware for staff and students has been ordered and will be deployed, more wall mounted projectors will go up, and a host of behind-the-scenes upgrades and improvements will take place. We’re collecting staff laptops to encrypt hard drives (for data security in case of loss or theft) and upgrading them to Windows 10, and the new staff desktops that go out (mostly in the primary and intermediate schools for now) will be Windows 10 as well. It should be a productive, and much less hectic summer than last year!