Well, the dust is settling down from the start of school! The rate of new support requests is dropping off to more normal levels, but we are still busy with plenty of requests. So much technology is being used now in so many classrooms and offices that we don’t get to pause for very long. Orders for new Chromebooks have come in already (high school social studies are getting their own dedicated cart), but delivery of the model we’re currently buying (an Asus designed for school use) is somewhat backed up. It seems this model is so popular nationwide that they can’t make them quickly enough!
We have been able to mount a lot of extra wireless access points in the last month. With the new cabling that went in over the summer, we’ve now moved the middle and intermediate schools to a much “denser” set up where we have access points in each individual classroom and not in the hallways. The access points are adjusted to run at a lower power (so they don’t interfere with their close neighbors), and support just those devices in the room. It means we can have far more devices on concurrently in adjoining rooms. We’ll need to move the high school over to this same model, and fortunately, we can make use of this next round of Erate support to do that. The cabling is all in place already, the new build had planned for this eventuality, we just didn’t want to buy all the access points at that time because they weren’t needed yet and they’d already be 4-5 years old by the time they were needed.
Now that KWRL is connected to our network via fiber we can bring them into our phone system. They’ve not been happy with the system they have, and for a few more wiring upgrades, a new switch and UPS, and the phones themselves, they can benefit from all the more advanced features that we have on our system. We already have an extra block of DIDs just for them, and now after our initial planning meeting with them we’re in the process of ordering new hardware and looking at their office cabling.