Just a quick note: when you log into your blog you will have a bunch of pull down menus at the top of your page. For example, you can log in, then go to ‘Add New’ and choose ‘Post’. That will bring you right to the new post page. There are a lot of other navigational items in the pull down so explore and see what works for you.

Also, there are a lot of new plugins & widgets that allow you to customize your site. For instance, directly to the right of this text (at the moment) is a ‘Subscribe by Email’ widget.

Also, there is a great new Google Maps plugin. Check this out!

We have created shared public calendars for each of our buildings. The calendars exist on the email server which means that everybody has access to them right out of Entourage.

Maintenance is entering information including building reservations and meetings. Also, some buildings are entering curricular information.

Watch this short tutorial if you would like more information in a ‘show and tell’ sort of way!

I took down the embedded video for this. If you want to see the video again please follow this link.

Out with the old, in with the new. We have begun the transition to our new VoIP phone system.  As proof here is my new phone:

New Cisco phones installed & working in d62 admin

…and here are most of the old phones from the admin building:

The old phones rested in Seth's office for a few days!

The next big day for district phones is August 13. On that day we move the eight non-phase 1 buildings to VoIP

For those who are interested we are moving to a Cisco based VoIP system & our service is from AT&T.

“The real hope for deep and enduring processes of evolution in schools lies with students. They have a deep passion for making schools work. They are connected to the future in ways that no adult is.” – Peter Senge

TILE stands for Technology Integrated Learning Environment.

The Space:
TILE classrooms are approximately twice the size of normal classrooms and have the ability to be split in two by a folding wall. TILEs should have enough laptops to allow two classrooms of students to work concurrently, as well as a smaller number of desktop computers. The furniture in the TILEs will allow for different configurations as it is mobile and of differing sizes & shapes. TILEs will have interactive technology deployments like touchscreen-whiteboards & iTouches. Because these are singular spaces in each of the buildings the district is committed to keeping them cutting edge.

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here? The focus isn’t on the technology alone, it also integrates any and all 21^st Century tools and teaching & learning concepts. A teacher may decide to use 30 laptops and an interactive whiteboard in the TILE, but for another teacher it might mean four laptops, a couple of cameras, some webspace, and room to spread out and work in groups.

Some ideas:
Technology should be transformative; laptops more than typewriters, interactive whiteboards are not movie screens. Technology allows us to do things we couldn’t do before. Consider these transformations:

• Instead of reading about globalization or mathematics or creative writing… use technology to talk with real world experts who ship jobs overseas, use math in construction or engineering, or writers & authors. Students can take this information and tell the story of connection. Publishing student work and celebrating is a very powerful motivator.
• Instead of always teaching language in our voice, use the student channels… take advantage of tools like IM and Chat, laptops, mobile devices, the places where students communicate with each other can also be the places where they learn.
• Instead of struggling with the scientific method…
  make everyone an expert. Keep the scientific method, but document it with pictures, movies, and interviews. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a video library of student science experiments where they explain and demonstrate their definitions, hypotheses, predictions, experiments, and conclusions?

Instead of you doing all the instruction…
Allow students to solve problems and share their solutions with the class, building, district… the world.

We are about two weeks into having a fully deployed fiber optic network across the district. Depending on who you are and what you do you should experience improvements that are obvious to ones that are subtle. I know that when we move data around the network we have sometimes shaved tens of minutes off the process. I know streaming content is more fluid. I know we can download large data files, like updates, in a reasonable time frame.

That’s not to say that the network is perfect – there is still work to be done. Things inside the district that might slow you down are:

• Old machines
• Old Airports (yes. Airports.)
• Bad wiring

We also have a bottleneck getting out (and back) from the Internet. We can now use our entire allotment of 13 Mbps down from the Illinois Century Network, that is still a pretty narrow pipe for 2000+ machines looking for access. (FYI – before our new AT&T fiber network was installed we had a grand total of 4.5 Mbps network access. Now we have 13 meg to the Internet & 100 Mbps in between buildings.)

All of these things we are working on, and some will show results earlier than others. The first four buildings to be rehabbed in the Master Planning Process for instance will be outfitted with new network cabling, wifi access, hard-wired ports & some new switches. Also, there are some options for us to increase from our existing 13 meg access, and as always we are looking for ways to upgrade machines.

Have you noticed a change for the better? What change do you still want to see?

In case you haven’t heard, our transition to AT&T’s fiber optic opt-e-man network was successful. Currently the Admin Building & Algonquin are up and running. We are confidant that the whole district will be switched over by Thanksgiving.
We are experiencing a real increase in speed, resources that were not open to us before are now available, and we can download… stream, you name it! This is exciting.

Starting school year 2009-2010 District 62 will no longer support Appleworks. I know this will be painful for some users, but for us to continue to move forward with new projects we have to cut loose old & outdated solutions. Appleworks falls into that category.

While some people still use Appleworks, it will not be available on district computers starting Fall ’09. The Mothership Apple does not support it. See their official page here for more information: AppleWorks Support

Those of you that still have AppleWorks documents, do not fear. District 62 has MicroSoft Office & Apple iWork. Below is a chart on how to use these software solutions to open your AppleWorks documents. Going forward please use Office to create new documents, and remember to save your AppleWorks stuff in either Office or iWork.

AppleWorks………..New Solution
Word Processing…..Open & Save in MicroSoft Word
Spreadsheet………….Open & Save in Apple Numbers (can export to Excel)
Database………………Save as an ASCII file in AppleWorks, open in FileMaker
Draw/Paint…………..Save as a jpeg in AppleWorks

I know this is going to hurt someone somewhere, and for that I am sorry. Apple’s support for this dried up around 2002 and we cannot continue to go forward while trying to support legacy software when we have better solutions available.

This summer we are switching our email and calendaring system. We currently use Communigate Pro* (See note below) for email and a homemade version of Apple’s iCal for calendars. Both are outdated in their feature sets, difficult to support, and increasingly unreliable.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION for all CCSD62 staff that have name@d62.org accounts:

• Our old email & calendar servers will be taken offline in mid July (exact date forthcoming)
  • If you need to keep d62.org email you must save it yourself
  • The new Exchange server will already be online when the old one goes down, providing for a seamless transition
  • Email addresses will remain the same, supported programs and webmail will change
  • Entourage will be our primary & supported email & calendar program
  • The webmail address will be simpler to remember

On the heels of licensing Microsoft Office for district and staff home use, we are going to adopt Microsoft Exchange as our new email & calendar server solution.  Our license agreement with Microsoft Office makes this a very affordable option. Entourage, a program bundled with Office for Mac, supports the Exchange email & calendar solutions. Entourage will be our primary application solution for email & calendars. Those of you crafty enough to know how to set up a mail program will have no problem setting up Mail if you prefer, but the Tech Department will primarily support Entourage.

For those of you that use our webmail, I think you are in for a pleasant surprise.

Take a look at the above screenshot & notice how Exchange’s web access keeps everything ordered just like your desktop. Email on the web will reflect email on your desktop, even if you use multiple mailbox rules. What’s more, all your calendars & email address are right there too. The combination of the desktop & web-based solution should help keep us better connected.

There will be training at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year for the new email & calendar system.

* Communigate Pro and Exchange are both email servers. Mail and Entourage are email clients or programs. You use Mail or Entourage (programs) to connect to Communigate Pro or Entourage (servers).

Wednesday April 29 was a happy day. That’s the day we could stop saying, “Broadband is coming, there’s no reason to think we won’t get funded.” Why? Because we got our E-rate funding for district wide broadband upgrades! Yes d62′ers, there is broadband and we are getting it. We have a meeting with AT&T Monday to sign off on the papers we need to get the ball rolling. I can’t wait & I am very excited.

If you want more information please post in the comments section & we will provide more information, but this is great news. Increased broadband will mean faster Internet, FileMaker, email, calendars, et cetera. This is not to say that we won’t have bottlenecks that slow us down sometimes. Slow machine’s are slow machines, bad wiring is bad wiring, but vast improvements should be felt everywhere. And speaking of slow machines, we’re working on that too. And the master planning construction that’s coming to your building – that includes new wiring. Synchronicity folks!

This is one of the first things we started this year. It took awhile to get to this milepost, but we were successful. Personally I want to thank Crystal & Lorenda for handling the monsterous amount of accounting paperwork, which is on-going of course, and which is also going to help us save money in telephony.

A good day, the first of many.