Tech Meeting Notes April 2014:
https://todaysmeet.com/wsfcstfapr2014District Meeting Notes: http://wsfcstechnology.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/april-2014-tech-facilitator-meeting-notes/
New staff:
- Brad Chambers: Working at Wiley and Jefferson
- Adam Seipel: New district technology facilitator replacing Michael who they ran off
- Jim Mendoza: Blast from the past,been back for a month working on Home Base
- Andy Smith is new technology network support, was at Jefferson and Wiley
- Steven Anderson is our newly departed director of instructional technology, working to get that position filled
- Data Management position and another tech facilitator position? to be filled also
Gilliam, Natalie, NTGilliam@wsfcs.k12.nc.us
- Donuts are from Sue Albertson (has cancer) living in PA commuting to New York—tumors are shrinking! She thanks everyone for their love and support!
- Natalie has a way to contact her-
PC Refresh/Classroom solution finish up/wireless upgrades
- Kevin met with county managers on the budget
- Much of it is driven by sales tax—bad weather affected income this year
- There is an unfunded plan is now in place:
- Will be sharing with principals
- Based on the Interactive projector set up
- Room inventories—he planned to have today to share, but will get to us.
- Where we have been and where we are going?
- Many full classroom solutions have gone into new construction
- We also had matching funds program—rolled out another 276 rooms
- Been about 1300 partial ones via school monies—like PTA, etc.
- Total 18.6 million spent over 7 years—pretty huge investment
- Rooms to go:
- Middle Schools- 689
- HS: 225
- Needs about 9.9 million to finish off all of them
Based on the survey:
- In red cost on Kevin's spreadsheet are the costs to finish or install in each and every room in the district—it’s an estimate to finish the job
- The numbers are based on the interactive projection system which are about $7500.00 per room
- Another Chart shows school by school—and cost to complete each school
- Schools that are part of construction or are not title one are in huge deficits
Wireless infrastructure:
- Race to the top gave us 1:3 ratio of wireless access points per classroom
- 2013-2014—we had the EC department upgrades and high school upgrades
- Another million dollars invested in that
- Now need to focus on middle and elem schools
Device life cycles
- Kevin and Chris have developed a "Dashboard of plans" A/B/C
- There are roughly 20,000 windows XP machines to retire ASAP
- Plan A
- K-2 classes —put four devices in every classroom –not sure of the best device yet—but not desktops
- 3rd and 4th grades: 15 units as part of mobile cart/room
- Same concept for middle schools: 20 units each for middle school classrooms
- High schools perhaps BYOD will fill in some of the gaps, so perhaps a little less spending there?
- He took all this information and playing around the different scenarios
- 1500 laptops at HS
- For 6th and 7th: 6800 units in MS
- Elementary: 8500 devices
- All told, this matches roughly the number of machines we need to retire—20,000
- There are roughly 41,000 out there—are there units not being used?
- May not be a one per one swap for old
- If every room in school is equipped, then maybe reclaim the labs, CTE?
- Maybe reclaim classrooms and remove some pods?
- 3rd grade will get those t-400 laptops that teachers recently turned in
- Parent advisory council and teacher advisory want to hear about what they are doing about this problem.
Timeline for the Plan
- No perfect solution: but to deploy mobile devices, then the prerequisite is to have wireless in place
- He’s got a proposal for the timeline—it’s a starting point.
IBM models 6792, and 8305 desktops
- Send Carla an email with the quantity working or non working
- The CRT monitors—only surplus if you don’t have a need for them—You will get nothing in return right now for them
- Get a quick quantity that is accurate…
- Carla Miller—separate pickup in later June
- Provide a separate quantity—for desktops and monitors
- Carla will send out a separate email asking locations of equipment, etc.
- They shred the hard drives
Chris Corbin: Power Point Presentation: Project updates:
Elementary Security Cameras-
- Directed by operations dept.
- 2 schools completely done, cash and smith farm
- 2 different vendors working on it
- Requirements for the cameras from tech department is adding infrastructure to support 16 cameras (running wires, pulling cable—need to be on a GB interface)
- Carla’s staff will be installing GB switches in the closets.
- Only for camera connections at this point—new server at school serving DVR purposes, etc.
IP phone update:
- Money saving measure with multiple lines per school but only pay AT&T for one line
- 12 sites remaining to finish
- The school phone number you have now will remain for emergency purposes—tied to 911
HS Wireless:
- Working on a 1:1 ratio for access points:classrooms, and new switches in the closets
AS 400 cloud migration:
- DPI is working with SAS to be able to use
- 24th district in the state doing this—we are not a guinea pig
- I series client will need to be installed on the workstation
- File that points to an ip address to point to Raleigh
- Principals and lead secretaries mainly will be affected by this
Work order system:
- Our finance KACE ticket system--$40,000 to maintain the system
- School Dude—been used by maintenance
- Cheaper than KACE, and friendlier user interface.
- Maintenance gave them a demo—especially from teacher perspective
- It is question based
- Routing will be done the same
- Will continue to use KACE while we slowly switch over to School Dude (we own KACE so no big rush)
- Should save money over the long term
- Perhaps by next meeting they will show us a demo
Server refresh for Middle Schools:
- Will start in August to refresh DELL 2600 servers
- You can image across the WAN, but it is problematic, so better to keep a server in the schools
- Consolidating all the print servers isn’t such a good idea either with all the crashes
- Will slowly start to go out to the middle schools, and make the switch.
- Doesn’t take long and no interruption or down time, will start in late august
- Installing VM-ware to run virtual servers, and a sole print server for the school,
- Also will serve dhcp services and imaging, & software deployments,
- Can schedule multi machine imaging
Student Email:
- It is happening
- Piloting at East Middle (piloting School net—this is driving this need)
- Attorney will not allow us to continue to use current ID’s for security purposes
- First four digits of first name, first four of last name and last four of student ID @wsfcsstudents.net
- Will change everything—log-in to the computer and email
- Email will start in 3rd grade.
- Will K-2…have the same old log-in?
- Account provisioning will weigh out the options?
- Email Address books: students will have separate book.
- If teachers want to search for students they can choose the student address book separately
- The groups will be provided for the whole school
- But other groups for clubs etc. would have to be maintained by individual teachers
- No real e-mail monitoring other than the regular webfilter
- The whole need for this is for logging into power school for school net assessments.
- Browser issues will creep in again.
- Students will also have sky drive access (50 GB)
- Whole new possibility for collaboration
- There will be an APP for smart phones/tablets
- School based decision to help students with set up on those devices or not?
- OWA app for apple for the email right now
Office 365 updates:
- Connect authenticate—School Dude uses same kind of authentication as email now
- Single Sign On: SSO enabled for School dude.
- When teachers access the Staff icon on desktop it will automatically login to email
- Been some Calls to help desk with problems with teachers who share some devices
- Problem also when you switch users
- APP called credential manager in windows 7 (have to clear out if teachers have checked the box to save credentials) I am attaching those instructions and also put them in Kace Article 111
- They will get screen shots for us to clear out those saved credential issues.
SHAREPOINT 2013 cloud hosted solution:
- Working with a local vendor to get everything in webportal migrating to the sharepoint 2013 environment
- Workflow for folders and permissions, etc.
- Integration with skydrive, blogging, social networking features
- At some point all the current webportals will migrate and be able to be seen on email
Image Updates:
- They have started working on them already.
- Lenovo showed them some new things and have revamped their imaging center
- Smart imaging—we built a single image and don’t have to add any drivers
- Then they store our basic programs and they update drivers before they ship
- WSFCS will still have to maintain an image library for re-imaging
- Lenovo will help us with maintaining and updating images
- Adding FireFox and java and flash updates to the new images.
- Updating to office 2013 with sky drive app
- Hopefully have them done and updated by end of May.
Memory model is
changing—
- default 8 GB of memory with the new devices
- Need to switch to a 64 bit operating system to accommodate for that
- Some 32 bit apps don’t work with that
- There may be some issues with print servers to accommodate for 64 bit machines
- Depending on the model, you will need to know if 32 or 64 bit series to select the correct image.
Windows 8.1 testing
- An x series and x 11-e
- YOGA hinge: laptop becomes a tablet—disables the keyboard
Office 365 –we are on A-2 version—the free version, have to
be on the A3 version to use any of those apps to be able to edit office
docs—too expensive
Jennifer Ellington:
- Volume Apple purchasing—for APPS
- Process was ordering through the price list
- Apple now forwards the code via email—those go to purchasing…no longer send out the "gift cards"
Computrace:
- vast majority our theft reports deal with this
- Computrace gives us compensation if they can not find the machine
- Has to have a police report within 14 days ..report to include whether or not the power cord was also stolen?
Joan Proffitt:
- AMTR: Don’t have to start yet
- Joan will start enabling the NCID accounts and resetting passwords, and it will generate an email to let you know to login and reset
- Disables account over night again--so need to go in after 15 minutes
- Joan will go ahead and start next week
- You will need to reset the password.
- There is a 2nd process for new people to subscribe
Jim Mendoza/Home base:
- It’s the state of NC tool kit of software products to get students ready for careers, college and life
- School Net—does three different features but big one integrating common core based tests and give those tests
- Tests can be taken electronically
- Students have to have an account in school net and in turn an email account
- Teachers can issue those tests in written form.
- To score it, you had to use test scanners
- BUT Toshiba brand e-studio –the copiers in most schools can be utilized to SCAN IT
- Teachers can print out answer sheets for those tests, and use them to scan and results can go directly in to the grade book
- Jim will send out a survey and track down the Toshiba model in your school and whether it is networked or not?
Another Tool in that tool kit:
- Gradebook in Power Teacher:
- Browser dependent, different versions of JAVA
- Once per month the products get locked down for maintenance—25th
- You can download stand alone gradebook version.
- Power Source site: you login in with your email address and can get support
- You will have to add software to machine where they will be scanning from the SCAN IT software.
- May have to move copiers to be near a drop or may have to put in a ticket for a new drop (but move first if possible)
- Email Jim with questions
Instructional Resources:
Melissa Edwards: queen of Learning Village
- Hello from Marlo…
- User name and pw for learning Village is same as AD login
- Learn 360 had a major upload of resources several months ago but also recently added other new resources that she is going to highlight
- Email Meliisa Edwards if you have questions
- Full email address is their user name, and pw: ws….
- Instructions for KACE data base #65 for how to change pw in Learn 360
- Brain pop and netrekkar are now linked…(side note)
- Learn 360: Calendar has links to videos and resources for a date
- History teachers were recently told about these resources
- If you go to the ADVANCED SEARCH area
- Can ALSO look things up by publisher or series
- Total training areas for things like Office 2007, and send someone the link (similar to atomic learning)
- Also pictures and sounds
Photo pin ( http://photopin.com/ ) is one of her favorite place to search for images
for creative commons and gives you a url to copyright site
MARTY CREECH:
- BYOD and mobile learning:
- Have created 2 RESOURCES for parents/staff
Technology Tool box page:
Brian Pikarski contact for curriculum pathways
Digital Safety curriculum:
- Each months will highlight a different ITS theme (via common sense)
- Will ask schools to submit plan of how teachers will teach the plan
- Digital Safety Curriculum is now part of the WSFCS policy and part of e-rate funding and will be renewed effort this fall.
- Policy 6161 has been revised and updated—will be covered in student responsible use agreement
- Timing is just bad for this to come out in the spring
- Will send out in the fall RUA (responsible use agreement) references policy 6161
- Kevin will post this document for us to look at
- Purple paper and electronic document for staff will have links to policy
- No user will have access until they have an RUA back.
- Student will not have access until they have training in digital safety.
- Statement about using 3g and 4g—they have agreed not to use those.
- Kevin will post this document on the blog site (shows changes to policy)
- Where’s the cross reference for high school students?
- An electronic flag in power School possible?
- Needs to be a streamlined process and may discuss at next month’s meeting
- Possibly a list of students who can’t get on and change their passwords—
- We will work next month on ideas
- End goal to follow policy and communicate with parents
- If you are not subscribed to blog site, can resend the link to subscribe to the blog site.
May 8th next meeting
