9-3-09+notes

__September 3, 2009 Meeting Notes__ Roundtable Questions: CPF? Stimulus? New Staff? N1H1 Precautions?

South Adams – Cindy Cash · ** Question: What are schools requiring computer labs to do in prevention of the N1H1 virus? ** We are discussing having students wipe off keyboards when they leave the class each time, washing their hands as they enter the classroom. What do you use to wipe off the keyboards or can something be sprayed on the keyboards that will not damage or discolor them? I suggested we buy students latex gloves which might be cheaper.

Smith-Green – Adam Skiles · CPF has been hit hard, A.V. dropped 19%. The hoped-for renovations will be smaller in scope than originally planned. · IDEA – implementing READ 180, Earobics through the web portal, Destination Math and Reading have been in place, but will now be in the portal for students at home as well. Looking at whether to keep Acuity from State Assessment Plan or go back to NWEA. · Tech Plan Grant will pay for Tech Integration Specialist for one year, conducting interviews now.

Wawasee – Dave VanLue · IDEA stimulus money is providing a technology coach at the elementary level. Also buying equipment for Special Needs. · Dave’s budget has not been impacted yet by property tax reform. · New WAN from multiple lightning strikes, the obsolete Proxim equipment has been replaced by Ceragon 200 mbps connections. · Upgraded to GroupWise 8 – all accounts are working well now. · Installed NComputing Labs in five locations – these are working well. · Rosara – using Ubuntu servers for their 1-to-1 labs in HS English. Will replace those boxes with thin clients down the road. · Just brought up the LightSpeed server this week. It integrates with Harmony well, and parents can now see where their students have been browsing online.

Prairie Heights – Andy Scheidler · New Superintendent will re-work their budgeting process, Andy is looking forward to more funding. · Replaced a wireless connection with a tail circuit for Internet to a remote building. · Andy is also having teachers request to move back from Acuity to NWEA assessments. · ** Question: Who is using Open Office, and with what kind of success? ** Lots of their existing computers won’t run Office 2007. You can run Open Office from a flash drive. Plymouth and Wawasee are using Open Office 3. They work well for opening Office 2007 docs and work well with creating .pdfs. Still looking for an open source substitute for Publisher. · Smith-Green looked at Open Office 2 in the past and decided to stay with MS Office 2007. E-Learning is part of what they are getting with their MS SLA. · Looking at LightSpeed for more reporting capabilities, especially with mobile laptops.

Whitley County – Anne Plunkett · Haven’t seen any money from ARRA yet. · Budget got nicked this year, hoping to maintain funding levels for next year in CPF. · Moved from United Streaming to Learn 360. It took some time to get all their video content copied locally. Got another 4,000 video files coming in an update. Teachers are pleased with the content, and Anne is saving lots of money. · Novell is mostly gone from the network, but still using ZEN to disribute applications. Active Directory is running everything. Anne’s tech had to rewrite some SIF agents since EduStructures was bought by Pearson. Pretty good learning curve took place to move to virtualized Windows servers on VM Ware. · Still working with Columbia City to get additional fiber in place to buildings. Embarq is telling Anne that they will have better pricing soon. · Student forms for registration, medications, etc. have been posted for printing at home and saving parents lots of time. Demographic changes were done through Harmony online as well. · ** Question: Are most of you still blocking YouTube? ** West Noble – Jan Lehman · Got to play being a Network Administrator this summer – virtualized servers, changed VLANS, new fiber through local telco, 20 mbps Internet connection, lots of workstations. · 2009 CPF is about half of what it was. Dennis VanDuyne is Superintendent as of July 1. · Stimulus funds are being used to save jobs and create new opportunities in Special Education. · Sharon is in her second year with Information NOW student management system. She is good at working with their end users.

Northwest Allen – Adela Dickey · CPF has not been changed, Business Manager wants to maintain it. · Have not seen any stimulus money, but certain to have to work on getting equipment in place from the Special Education Dept. · New elementary opened this fall, using building project money for purchasing technology equipment. Carpenter’s strike slowed things down this summer. · Lot of technology in the HS, English classrooms are 1-to-1 with desktops or laptops. Social Studies will have 1-to-1 laptops eventually. MediaCAST went in place with both United Streaming and Learn 360, with perhaps United Streaming going away.

Huntington – Tom Ashley · One big project – complete strategic marketing upgrade. · Bought about 500 mini-laptops this year through grants. Eighteen 1-to-1 classrooms in place at this time. Middle School is piloting using textbook adoption fees to fund their 1-to-1 laptops. These teachers were willing to go to a digital platform for their textbook needs. Moodle is in all the 1-10-1 classrooms and considering it for all classroom webpages. This should help teachers keep their online content current. · Using eDirectory and LDAP to import students into Moodle. · Big fiber project with Norlight is going on, waiting for Duke Energy to ready poles for hanging GB fiber. Roanoke and Salamonie will still be wireless. · Huntington added an emergency notification solution that ties into Powerschool, it will also make attendance calls for high school. Parents can leave messages for planned absences. · Got DataCove email archiving in place with their GroupWise upgrade to 8. Consolidated all 13 post offices into one. · Going to a New Tech High School model next year (Plymouth is planning and Whitley County is talking about it.) – lots of remodeling will take place. Going to use mini-laptops. Not real happy with HP support and account representatives. Question: What mini-laptops do you like? Warsaw uses Lenovo. Plymouth is looking at Dell’s touchscreen. Wawasee has looked at MSI Win models. Concord has Acer Aspires in the 10” model. · Hiring an energy “czar” through Energy Education. · Lots of stimulus funds coming that will bring in READ 180, SuccessMaker. · ** Question: We have to use Acuity in one school. What are you going for your high ability students? ** NWEA is serving a different role in Huntington, particularly to show growth for the high ability students. The law says you have to be able to show growth. Acuity lets you test off-grade level but you have to manually assign that.

Region 8 – Phil German · Working on providing SES tutoring in schools with Amy Leeson leading the way. · WeAreClosedToday.com project through NIESC for delays and closures is up in the Fort Wayne area. Channel 55 is signed up but other media outlets are waiting to see more schools sign up before they come onboard. · ** Question: Phil has been asked to setup a Powerschool training with Pearson. Anyone interested? ** NW Allen is migrating so they would probably be interested. East Noble would be interested. They are also writing an IEP piece within Powerschool. Warsaw has one in place.

East Noble – Kay Reinoehl · CPF seems to be holding steady. · Lots of changes this summer closing two elementary schools. Opened a new elementary school. Brought all students to one middle school in town. · Put all new technology in the new elementary school. It was supposed to be ready January 1, they are still buttoning things up. · Moved about 600 iMacs to the older school that is no longer being used. Used a Fort Wayne asset management group to recycle them. · Kay has worked closely with the Special Education Director to make sure that things purchased work in their system. Expanding Waterford Reading and SuccessMaker for Special Education. · Purchased School Messenger for notifications. · Lots of changes to Powerschool and SharePoint this summer.

Four Area Technical – Kyle Smith · Governing Council voted that firewall, content filtering and email archiving should be done by ENA. It has added a step of communication for changing filtering rules or retrieving archived email. · The Governing Council is looking at a shared New Tech High School for the 11 member districts. · Part of the career center moved into a renovated grocery store this summer. Looking for a new location for culinary arts. · Put up a live meeting server for reducing travel from the districts to their offices. · Finished up last year’s GB fiber project to connect their buildings. · Serving about 600 students this year, a record high number. About 2,000 adults enrolled for adult education.

Concord – Dick Pyle · We have been very involved in the use of ARRA funds. Special Education classrooms with direct instruction will get projectors, SMART Boards, document cameras and laptops for students. We subscribed to Education City for Grades 3-6 and Study Island for Grades 7-12. Considering Gaggle for student email for these students. · Trying to deal with the loss of New Facility Appeal funds from the State budget. · Moving toward our SIF Solution. Destiny is in place, planning to add Storage Manager from Novell next but their SIF agent was not going to be developed further. We went with a new company whose SIF agent was not ready when promised. So we are back to the Novell agent, and trying to iron out kinks like student logins that don’t work. · Moved to GroupWise 8 on the server end this summer, and are now backing up email. Slowly moving clients to the new version. · Upgraded to latest versions of Cisco Call Manager and Unity for IP phones. · Went with Retain from Gwava for email archiving. · We are using XEN virtual servers for virtualization, but the project has gone over budget trying to get it done. · We wanted to put in an ACS server but ended up with a Free Radius server.

Plymouth – Janice Curtis · Bruce Johnson became Technology Director in March, Dan Smeltz became Assistant Technology Director. · No Stimulus money has come before the Technology Department. o They decided to bring in Auto Skills with stimulus money. · Went to Powerschool this year, Inform for data mining. Using Easy Tech for K-4 tech skills for students. · Bought 200 additional 2GO laptops. · Have four 1-to-1 lab with Mini-Dells in the Junior High. · Two NComputing labs at the High School and all nine English classrooms are 1-to-1. · Looking at letting students bring in their own laptops next year, perhaps in a rent-to-own scenario. Warsaw allows students to bring their own laptops in and get on their open wireless LAN, but they don’t get to all their files. · All students have logins to the network right now, but considering a generic login again for K-2. All the common drives for students are open to the staff now. · Whitley County has a form for evaluating possible programs for students. · ** Question: Plymouth is looking for a CMS Solution, who has one? ** Warsaw uses Joomla. Wawasee is hosting their own SchoolCenter sites. Concord is using SchoolCenter. · Plymouth has separated Moodle into two divisions, students and administration. Huntington is looking at using Moodle for classroom pages instead of a CMS.

Warsaw – Elaine Bultemeier, Jim Lemaster · ** Question: What are you doing with printers and copy machines? ** Smith-Green went to new Oce copiers this year. Wawasee had an audit by Advanced Imaging and they offered to take over their printing needs. · Looking at 20% cut in CPF next year. · Opening four new buildings that came in under budget, so construction funds may offset the CPF reduction. Weekly meetings with the construction foremen has been great for coordinating changes to the plans as needed. · IDEA Stimulus funding - Special Education has a committee that Jim and Elaine are part of so they at least get to be in on discussions. · Some new staff has been hired in Special Education, but they are struggling to get enough technology in front of them. · Warsaw hired a co-op student this fall to help in lots of roles in the Technology Dept. They also have a part-time volunteer from the University of Mexico who wants to improve her English. · New Superintendent is pro-technology and wants to move forward reflectively with new initiatives. · Rolled out new teacher computers, Stoneware for remote access. · Jim will send out a Lunch and Learn with Calypso from ESCO Communications on Sept 24.

Southwest Allen – Don Chase · No changes in CPF at this point. · Stimulus money will basically implement the Tech Plan from last year – Compass Learning for Math, READ 180, Waterford Reading, Study Island. · Summer projects include a Samsung IP phone system, migration from Nortel to Cisco in three buildings, wireless at the High School, replaces lots of servers using XEN, GroupWise 8 upgrade, put in Phase 2 of Left Hand SAN solution for disaster recovery. · Online student registration in Powerschool is a year old, and going well talking to Edulog. Ran a Powerschool registration for Senior parking, filled the slots in 20 minutes. · Going with Reload to backup GroupWise and Reveal to bring up email archives.

DOE – Mark Broderick · Tech Plan Grant o 120 schools are due November 1 - link to 3 year tech plan guideline and checklist is new. Just hit the points that are important. § The following is needed: · Page 1 overview by who is writing the plan · Page 2 building plan signed by principal (one for each building) · Page 3 finance and supt need to sign § Tie everything into any existing grants in place o the other annual tech plan update is due at the same time § Two different general messages are expected: either our tech plan is working and we’re achieving these things, or our tech plan wasn’t working and here is what we’ll change. o Plan for next year is to have it online to fill out · Title II, Part D  o  Cadre 1 is done, money should be coming soon. o Cadre 2 has nine awards being paid out of 2009 Title II funds, Fort Wayne is one of them. The rest are being paid out of stimulus funds. Money should show up in November. o Cadre 3 is coming with Stimulus money for the same LEAs from Cadre 2. Partners are important! · STAA has been moved to the finance department. · Gary Bates will be the DOE representative for schools north of Indy. · State Contract for Internet is up for renewal. Mark supposes that ENA will still be the major player. · Donna Smith has retired, so Mark is working with the Media Center folks.