Mon May 23 2011, 7:00pm
Yale School Library
Regular Meeting

REPORTS TO THE BOARD

Tech Report

Date: May 18th, 2011
To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary



The main thing for our department this month has obviously been the computerised MSP testing at the Intermediate and Middle schools, but while it caused everyone concerned to hold their breath somewhat, things really went very smoothly.  We tested a little over 70 students at a time over 4 days at the Intermediate school, and I think about 170 students at a time over 5 days at the Middle School.  Aside from a few minor glitches in the software here and there, on the whole it all worked better than it had last year, and it wasn't bad last year!

We have recently installed a few low cost IP based security cameras to provide coverage in a couple of computer labs where we had been having some minor vandalism problems, which has helped to curtail the damages.  The cameras were relatively cheap and easy to install so this has combined with Tegan's work to get a COPS grant for security equipment in an attempt to fit the Primary School with cameras (it has none currently) and increase coverage at the Intermediate School.  If the grant comes through the plan is to have the buildings wired for ethernet professionally but have ourselves buy and install the actual cameras and run the system from our own commodity servers running free software (ZoneMinder).  A security system on this scale is certainly a new departure of our department, having left this to outside contractors previously, so I'm sure there will still be things for us to learn as we go along, but it does offer the possibility of a lower cost and more flexible security camera system going forwards.

Speaking of wiring, shortly after school gets out we will be having some extra data and power wired into Kelly Comstock's art room at the Intermediate school as she has requested a few computers to allow her students to do some online research around art.  I know that Michael Smith in the Middle school makes quite a bit of use of the Internet to allow his students to view various art works so this seems like a worthwhile thing for Kelly.  We'll also be getting contractors in to rewire some of our oldest connections in the Middle and High schools.  Some of this wiring has either atrophied over time or was of questionable quality to begin with and it needs to be replaced.

We have just finished putting together a cart of 20 of the small netbook laptops for the Primary School.  Margaret Deffenbaugh has been advocating for this for quite a while in order to allow groups of their students more regular access to online resources as their lab is generally used all the time as are her library computers.  We'll probably have to schedule a bit of staff training to ensure the teachers are comfortable with them and the kinds of resources they can deliver.

Our network connection to Yale has just been switched over to a fiber link through Cascade Networks.  Previously we had not really had much choice in good quality connections, so we were renting a rather expensive T1 connection, but now we are paying much less for the same bandwidth with considerably lower latency.  I believe this came about due to Tegan's work with Cascade Networks on another project.  We're starting with the same bandwidth of 1.5M as that has been sufficient up to now, but we have the headroom now to increase this in the future if needed.  Kyle Niekamp and his class will be giving it a real test next week when they take part in the ‘Where In Washington' statewide student videoconference, along with Mark Knudson's class at the Intermediate school (they're in different sessions!).