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.

New Solutions: Microsoft Office

Expect a few new things in district soon. First off, we are licensing Microsoft Office for the entire district. I know this is good news for a lot of you, but wait, it gets better! First, this is an open ended license that allows us to install on as many machines as we need, no matter if it’s a Mac or a PC. If we add 200 machines next year (and wouldn’t that be great) we can install it on them & still be in compliance. Second, if you are a district employee you can install Office on your home computer. So if you are looking to buy a new machine for the holidays don’t spend your money on Office, we can provide it for you.

I hope you find this to be a benefit to you, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• You can install the districts version of Office on ONE home computer. If you install it on more than one then you are breaking copyright law – and you don’t want Microsoft mad at you. We are working on some kind of sign up sheet to keep track of who installs it at home – it is currently a work in progress.
• We will not have this installed throughout the district this school year. We simply do not have the manpower to get to every machine. We will try & get it to the most critical areas first. We are currently assessing what we can install on our various machines over the summer. Suffice it to say that a 9 year old machine may not be able to run the entire office suite, so in some cases the install profile may only call for Word & PowerPoint. For school year 09-10 it will be installed throughout the district. For now the tech department, including the building tech liaisons, will install on an as needed basis.
• We do not have the disks yet – we just placed the order yesterday (December 2)!

New Solutions: Microsoft Exchange Email Server

Another exciting aspect of this is that we can migrate our email service to the more mature & powerful Microsoft Exchange Server. The tech department has been testing this for the past few weeks & it’s been very positive. If everything goes well we would like to move to the new email server over the summer. This will mean a little staff development – but it will be worth it for the increased stability & feature set that will become available to us.

New Solutions: Destiny for LMCs & textbooks

Another new item that we are bringing into the district is Follett’s LMC & textbook automation solution Destiny. Replace the word automation with inventory if it makes it easier to understand. Destiny is a robust inventory solution that will provide easy access to our district’s LMC catalogue to our entire community. Further, we will have a way to track each textbook down to the student!

New Solutions: District Blogs

Another new thing is this blog software that you are looking at. This service is also available to all district employees, for school & district use only of course! If you are interested in launching your own classroom blog please do not hesitate to contact me.

Future Solutions: Broadband Connection

In the near future we are looking to bring in much faster internet & network connectivity. We would like to be able to make a decision in a few weeks & be ready to go with a new connectivity solution by the beginning of next school year.

There is more to come, but I hope this feels like progress!

Links:

MicroSoft Office for Mac

MicroSoft Exchange

Destiny

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