Date: August 17th, 2011 To: Michael Green From: Steve Rippl Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
Overall the summer has gone pretty well for us in the Tech department. We have had enough space that we've all managed to get a little vacation time in and still be lined up at this point to have everything back in place by the start of school. There's always the last minute push as we follow behind the custodians, putting rooms back together after their summertime efforts, but this looks to be in hand at this point.
Our room shuffles (mostly at the Intermediate School and Yale) have pretty much been taken care of. With Kim Knudson taking her board up to Yale Chris Wiseman decided to invest in a new board for his new teacher Adrienne Gragg, who had used an interactive board at her previous school. This was helped by Promethean having their usual summertime sale including free installation, so we actually put the new board up at Yale and moved Kim's previous board into Adrienne's new room, easier then bringing that enormous board all the way up the valley! Our ESD put on some intermediate level whiteboard training and quite a few of our teachers went along.
We've updated MS Office for our staff, upgraded the software on quite a number of our servers (still one or two to finish), got our new DNS/DHCP/Thin Client management software in place and running, and have moved over to our new helpdesk system. We're preparing a few more short tech-tips screencasts, for example one showing how the new helpdesk system works. We've also pulled another slew of our very oldest computers and replaced them with new desktop machines for staff and thin clients for students.
There's currently a lot of time going into Sips as we not only add the Middle and High Schools onto the Math tracking but also lay the groundwork for our new Lewis River Academy. It's tracking and reporting needs are quite similar to TEAMs, so we may well be building a system for them both to utilize.
Finally, right now we have our annual Moodle Bootcamp running, with Mark Knudson taking about 10 of our staff through the ins and outs of creating their online class spaces. We have a core cadre of Math teachers there working on unifying their presentation of the new Integrated math courses, and we'll be discussing the possibility of taking the assessments online through Moodle.