To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: September 16, 2022
RE: Tech Department Report
As usual, it's been a busy start to the school year for us in tech! Late enrollment has meant more student Chromebooks to prepare and hand out and whole carts to put together for new elementary sections. I think the slightly higher than usual staff turnover has led to more needs, more room changes, etc, contributing to demand. While we are still busy I do see an easing in the rate of new help requests, so I think we’ll be able to catch our breath soon! As the year has started, students have got their new devices and we have put on some teacher training on Google products and GoGuardian for new teachers and the middle school. The vast majority of our staff have been able to hit the ground running tech-wise.
Over the summer we (with the help of our facilities dept) installed some more of the new interactive TVs in classrooms. Each school got a new one, but James Johnston contributed with middle school funds to make sure all the middle school math teachers are now equipped with them, making it easier for them to “show their working” when dealing with digital math resources! The TVs make it easy to annotate over the top of what’s displayed on the screen, whatever the source of the materials, and have such a clear and bright picture making them much easier to see than our projectors. We’ve also been upgrading the software on some of our servers in the background and making planned improvements to some of the applications that we provide (Sips and the KWRL portal for example). We’re also having to update some of our background automation as Google has increased the security for their API access (things never stand still for long in this field!).
We are in the process of testing a new open-source phone system and this has gone live with KWRL acting as our guinea pigs. The Cisco phone system’s licensing has changed and it’s become very expensive if we want to add any more capacity to that system (or even keep it up-to-date software-wise) and so we’re looking at lower-cost alternatives. The audio quality of the new phones we’re trying isn’t really good enough, so we have to find out if that is a hardware or software problem before continuing to expand the trial. Also, in the process of connecting some of our existing Cisco handsets to the new system for re-use, and to compare audio quality with the other brand we’re trying out. We won’t expand the rollout until we’re completely happy with how it’s all working.