I thought I’d take a moment and provide a little information on what Hempfield is doing with wireless networks. Since wireless network technology became available, Hempfield has typically deployed entry level wireless access points in a somewhat haphazard manner. This worked fine when there were relatively few wireless clients and the applications running over the network weren’t all that bandwidth intensive. With Classrooms for the Future and our own efforts to move every teacher to a laptop, the old wireless system just didn’t cut it anymore. About a year ago we began a search for an enterprise wireless solution that would improve security, performance, and manageability for all wireless access points around the district. After evaluating several vendors, we decided on Aruba Networks. Their solution provided the best mix of features, compatibility, and price.
Using a combination of stimulus money and district funds, we were able to deploy enterprise wireless hardware throughout the high school beginning in August 2009. The project was completed in September and planning immediately started for upgrading the middle schools. Both middle schools were upgraded by February 2010 and we have since started deploying equipment in all seven elementary schools.
3Com IntelliJack Switch
Our installations of Aruba access points have also extensivly utilized 3Com’s IntelliJack switches. These switches are designed to install into a standard electrical wall box and provide powered gigabit ethernet ports. The Intellijacks are fully managed switches and have allowed us to implement the necessary network changes for performance tuning without significantly altering the rest of the network infrastructure. In several buildings they are also providing a platform for the future installation of VoIP phones and at the high school they have added the network ports necessary to monitor data projectors in each classroom.
We currently offer several wireless networks in the buildings that have been upgraded to the Aruba system. Networks include the standard “Hempfield” network for staff, a carts network for district-owned student computers, and an IU13 network for IU employees.
There are mountains of snow on the ground, the forecast is for a “wintery” mix, and I am in Hershey - what do all these thing mean? It must be PETE&C again!
Before the PETE&C 2010 Keynote
Sir Ken Robinson discussed the need to fundamentally change education versus the typical methods of reform. The education systems and practices in the US (and other areas as well) were mainly founded in the industrial revolution, and are not really equipped to deal with the changes that have occurred in the last thirty years or so. Staying on top requires adapting to change in the world. Switching to a model of education modeled on agriculture (not assembly line) - encouraging growth vs bolting on pieces deemed “essential” - is one possible solution.
I later attended a session on the GigaPan camera system that was particularly interesting. GigaPan is a system developed by Carnegie Mellon, NASA, and Google. It is based on a robotic camera mount that connects to a tripod and automatically positions and controls the camera to take extremely high resolution photos in sequential order in a panorama. The individual images are then stitched together to create a single giant image. The images can be uploaded to GigaPan’s website, which allows visitors to view the images similar to how the Google Earth controls works.
All in all, Monday at PETE&C was successful, although the conference did seem to be a little quiet this year.
It’s been a long time since I posted anything here, probably due to the sheer amount of things going on at Hempfield. I’ve spent much of today rebuilding a mail server, and while watching status bars on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, I took some time to reflect on the recent introduction of the iPad.
Much of my thinking is paralleled in this article on Cult of Mac. It’s probably the most level-headed response I’ve seen to the iPad anywhere on the Internet. The vast majority of the negative comments about the device center around “it doesn’t do X…” In some cases these are totally legitimate complaints, but it seems a bit premature to complain when the product hasn’t even shipped yet, and a software update correcting many of these problems is sure to be released soon after an iPad appears in the wild.
As the Cult of Mac article points out, the iPad is a device designed for humans. Which, to the tech savvy reviewers of the Internet, means it doesn’t do a lot of things you’d expect of a computer, or at least do them in the way you’d expect. As I rebuilt my mail server today, I was struck by just how inhuman many of the interfaces on a computer actually are. I would never expect my parents to be able to rebuild a mail server, but I see similar interface problems almost every day with even the most basic consumer oriented software.
Is the fact that anyone could pick up an iPad and instinctively know how to use it really a bad thing? For all of the problems we have at work explaining why running Firefox with 15 tabs, iTunes, iMovie, Mail, and DVD Player simultaneously isn’t the best idea, or why saving your files in 15 different places across the hard drive is not a good idea, I’m really questioning if a human centric interface is really a bad idea. It would certainly simplify many of the support questions we get. While I will miss the ability to tinker, there is always the full blown computer for that, plus coding on a 9″ screen doesn’t sound like fun.
That said, there is no way the iPad in its current form could replace a laptop for a lot of what goes on at Hempfield, but who knows what the future will hold in terms of hardware and software upgrades. Apple seems to have made its views very clear for the future of personal computing. Time will tell if it pans out across the rest of the industry.
This may quite possibly be the coolest thing I’ve seen all year. It’s an app for the iPhone 3Gs that combines the camera, GPS, accelerometer, and compass to overlay information onto live video.
Over the summer the Technology Department will be constructing a completely new Active Directory environment for the district. AD controls many of the systems in the district and is the source of authentication for the majority of applications used by staff and students. Over the last few years, a number of problems with our current AD environment have prompted us to evaluate whether a rebuild was necessary. We decided that a rebuild was the best choice given a number of other projects going on.
We’ll be deploying a pure Windows Server 2008 environment to coincide with other upgrades around the district (10.5 / 10.6 on the Mac side and Vista/Windows 7 on the PC side). In addition, we’re integrating a number of other services including DNS and DHCP. These services have been linked with AD previously, but we’re expanding their servers out into different buildings to provide more fail-proof service.
Open Source in Educaiton
An interesting panel discussion on the status of open source in education. Interestingly, the big focus of all of panel members was not just on cost savings, but on the reuse of the recovered finds for things like professional development and new hardware. Each panel member shared implementation stories of different open source applications in different environments.
Preparing Teachers to Integrate Smart Phones
A group of first year teachers shared their uses of smartphones in the classroom. I was hoping that this would have been focused on the student use of smartphones, rather than staff. In general, the session was a simple overview of smartphone capabilities.
NETS-A Release
The NETS-A are a set of standards developed by ISTE to guide administrators on how to be effective proponents of technology in education. One of the most important lessons learned in the development of the guidelines was that the building administrator is one of the most important determining factors in the adoption of technology in the classroom, regardless of the teachers’ or district’s enthusiasm.
Doing More With Less
This panel discussion covered a variety of topics on how to reduce IT costs including open source, remote administration, eliminating software subscriptions, outsourcing depending on environment, looking at the appropriateness of salaried positions, video conferencing, online forms, copy accounting, central receiving, and student tech support. The general discussion was helpful and reinforced that Hempfield is on the right track for controlling and reducing costs.
I’m attending NECC for the first time this year. I haven’t had a chance to pick my workshops yet, but it looks like there are quite a few good ones, including more targeted at administration, which is my one complaint about PETE&C.
The keynote is tonight and I’m currently waiting in my seat for the start. The atmosphere reminds me a bit of Macworld, only Im not surrounded by tons and tons of Apple geeks.
The technology roadmap was created to show how each technology project fits together into an overall plan. Plans usually need some sort of goal to measure their effectiveness. As such, the roadmap begins with a few general goals for the department:
Improve classroom technology through direct support, more focused training, and increased funding
Provide a cross-platform infrastructure capable of supporting 21st century education and business functions within the district
Prepare for a shift towards small, portable, wireless devices, potentially owned by a large portion of the student body
Stop using gaf tape and chicken wire to make things work
The first goal is the standard goal of almost every tech department - improve classroom technology. Direct support and more focused training refer to our two divisions within the department, Operations and Instruction. Improving direct support of the hardware and software must go hand in hand with the instructional team’s efforts in the classroom. This also holds true for planning and curriculum writing in the future. The operations and instructional teams must work together with the administration to appropriately plan for the future role of technology across K-12 curriculum.
Goal number two reflects my personal belief that the best approach to prepare for future technologies is to build a strong, cross-platform infrastructure. Hempfield’s application servers run a variety of operating systems from Mac to Linux to Windows. Similarly, we strive to make sure that those applications can be accessed by any type of client while still being part of an enterprise environment.
Personal, network enabled, electronic devices are becoming more and more common amongst the student body. The first student owned iPhone showed up on our network two days after the initial launch. We have recognized that students using their own devices, laptops included, on our network (much like a college campus) is a far more realistic scenario than a one-to-one implementation. While many details still need to be worked out, this is the future that the Tech Department is preparing for.
Finally, partially a joke and partially serious, I’m hoping to cut down on the amount of gaf tape and chicken wire used to patch things together. For many years, we have done whatever necessary to keep things running, not always with the correct tools, and certainly not always in the best long term interests of the district. Moving forward, how the job is done will be just as important as whether or not it was finished.
Later this week, I’ll be giving a presentation on the district’s technology roadmap. The roadmap contains details on where we’re going with differnet projects ranging from network security to the website to an official technology curriculum. I’ll be posting bits and pieces of the roadmap here throughout the next few weeks.
Part 1 of the roadmap posted here is the website, or more appropriatly the district’s collection of web services and applications. Hempfield’s current site is a bit of a disaster and in need of much work. The Technology Department is in the process of developing a new site to address many of the problems. We’re also integrating several other products and services and giving guidelines as to how each will be used. Each of the products or services below are different pieces of how Hempfield will be working over the Internet.
The Website - located at www.hempfieldsd.org, the district website will primarily be for static information with a limited number of contributing editors. The site will however, be integrated with many of the services below for live updates and dynamic content.
Blogs - located at einstein.hempfieldsd.org, the district’s WordPress MU server will be hosting more dynamic content for a variety of interests ranging from school news to technology updates. These blogs are public and available for anyone to read. Individual staff pages will also be moved to WordPress.
Personal webspace - for staff members who need more control than what WordPress offers, accounts will be available for staff members to upload websites that they have created on their own.
Twitter - the district Twitter feed, www.twitter.com/hempfield and www.twitter.com/hsdathletics, will contain realtime updates and district news. These feeds will be embedded into the district website and used when possible for other projects like informational TV channels.
Moodle - the district Moodle site, moodle.hempfieldsd.org will be the primary location for all of Hempfield’s academic resources on the web.
Google Apps - the district Google Apps domains for staff and students will be used for a variety of academic projects as well as for public information. The official district calendars will be built in Google Calendar and embedded into the district website. Any users of Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, or any other calendar application will be able to subscribe to the districts’ calendars.
networks. Since wireless network technology became available, Hempfield has typically deployed entry level wireless access points in a somewhat haphazard manner. This worked fine when there were relatively few wireless clients and the applications running over the network weren’t all that bandwidth intensive. With Classrooms for the Future and our own efforts to move every teacher to a laptop, the old wireless system just didn’t cut it anymore. About a year ago we began a search for an enterprise wireless solution that would improve security, performance, and manageability for all wireless access points around the district. After evaluating several vendors, we decided on Aruba Networks. Their solution provided the best mix of features, compatibility, and price.
