It seems as though our schools have hit their strides tech wise. One indicator we watch is the amount of bandwidth we’re pulling in from the Internet at any one time. Averages go up steadily every year as more use is made of online resources, and currently our daytime “average” for the District is usually between 100 and 200 Mbs. K20 (our State network provider) does a great job of staying ahead of demand and increasing our capacity. Last year they brought us up above the 100M limit to a full Gig and we very soon began making use of the extra headroom. We have now briefly seen spikes as high as 600M, which is currently very infrequent, but clearly a sign that more and more is being done online across the whole district. One potential weak link in our network was the connections to the intermediate and high schools. They were capped at 100M until late last year, then we worked with Cascade to upgrade that equipment and put up to 1G of capacity there. We currently only pay for 200M, which is plenty for the time being and can be easily raised when the need comes.
I mentioned last month that some of our Chromebook orders were being delayed due to the popularity of the current Asus educational model. We’re still waiting on a few, but the high school social studies team got lucky and their order was fulfilled pretty promptly, they now have their new cart in place and are making use of it.
We’re also beginning another round of staff computer upgrades, this time in the middle school. We don’t upgrade a whole school at once, but rather about a third at a time spread out over 18 months or so. this makes it easier for us to manage. The middle school will also shortly be getting a new Chromebox lab. James is looking for an additional testing location, so he’s buying the Chromeboxes and Tech is able to supply monitors and keyboards out of the stock we have. We’ve also been progressing with some of the background server upgrades that we didn’t have time to get to over the summer. We’re in the middle of upgrading our virtual server cluster, then we’ll be able to update the client machines themselves.