iPods, Cellphones, PDAs, etc.

Administrators always seem to pose policy questions in terms of being more restrictive or less restrictive. Portable media devices and their accompanying policies are no exception. But the fact of the matter is that ever since the dawn of the boombox, kids have had these devices in schools. I think the major difference here is size. A walkman or CD player is much easier to spot with huge, old-school headphones. Nowadays, iPods come smaller than ever with headphones that slip right in the ear. Throughout my high school career as these portable media devices began to appear everywhere and diversify constantly, it felt like the school administration was reacting to these devices out of fear more than educational interest. During a long final exam period I had my CD player with me and I was playing classical music to help me concentrate during the exam. I always perform better with light classical music behind me. Of course I had them taken away. Not because I could have been cheating on the test - which was impossible to do, not because I was distracting other students - and I was not, not because of any educational reason; but, they were taken away simply because I was not "supposed" to have it even though there was no written policy in effect at the time. In my policy I would have no problem with a student using a media player during an exam as long as I approve that it is in fact being used for that purpose - as opposed to cheating - and as long as the device is not causing a distraction to other students. Overall, my take on this issue may be considered radically different from what I experienced.

We should not be worried about being more or less restrictive. We need to be thinking about these devices from an educational viewpoint. First, the most obvious, if a student is using any such device during a lecture and is causing a distraction for themselves or for the students around them, the device needs to be either put away or taken away until the end of class. It is the same idea as two students who cannot keep quiet in the classroom during class. We also need to capitalize on the educational potential of these devices. Today, many cell phones, and PDAs can perform similar functions. I recently read an article about a school that uses cell phones and PDAs in classroom instruction. For example, the teacher during lecture can pose a question at the students and have students input their responses using these devices and display the results on the board. Teachers are able to ensure that every student participates and supplies an answer. This is much more effective than traditional methods where one student - usually the same student through time - raises a hand and answers the question. For other students who usually do not like to participate or do not like to go out on a limb and be wrong when answering a complex question, they have the chance to submit their answer anonymously and gain so much more from the instruction.

My proposed policy is two-fold. It puts responsibility on the teachers and administration not only to prevent distractions due to the use of these devices, but to begin designing learning environments(where possible) that capitalize on the educational benefits of these devices. These devices would be permitted in the school and in the classroom with the following conditions. During class, a student may only use such devices when directed by the teacher. If a student is caught using a device when not appropriate or if the student is distracting other students, a student will be asked to put the device away and in subsequent offenses the device will be taken away and held by the teacher until the end of the class period. Teachers and Administration will design learning environments, where possible, that will employ the use of such devices in an educationally appropriate manor that is beneficial to learners.

Curing a Virus

After identifying the actual problem, I need to decide if the problem poses a threat to any unaffected systems and if so, take those systems offline. I need to perform a thorough check on all of the machines possibly affected - hopefully this would not be the servers. I will check the general network connections first to make sure the infrastructure is not damaged. Once this is done, I will send out communication of some sort to all faculty, students, and staff telling them about the issue and what i will be doing to stabilize everything.
First I want to check the cafeteria point of sale system. It is very important that kids eat obviously, and if that system is down, you cannot count on students having cash and the district will surely not want to pay for the food for the kids. Next I will make sure the attendance system is working properly including access to student records for the guidance office. After I am sure students can be fed - which is a basic necessity - I want to make sure that the office staff can start processing attendance for the day and the guidance office can have student records available for any advising they might be doing today.
Next I will make sure that the financial systems and general administration systems are operational including classroom telephones and security cameras. In the school district I'm thinking of - Northampton Area - the cameras and phones would rank here. Officers are posted throughout the school and all doors are locked all the time so cameras are an extra bonus but not a higher priority than student meals and guidance. Phones are all standard phones. The last thing I would check is the computer labs and teacher's computers. I have already sent out communication telling faculty of the problem and in that communication I have told them to back up any files they really need on a jump drive. I will go around and assist if needed with my staff. After checking the server over thoroughly or refreshing or reinstalling the server, I will simply image all the computer lab computers and faculty computers with a fresh, clean image just in case anything came over the network into those computers.

Moving from Outsourcing to Internal

There are 3 main points I wish to make briefly based on my findings. First, anytime a school is building its own technology department - regardless whether or not the program is brand new or just switching from outsourcing to an internal department - the district must design a technology plan. Any time a decision is made regarding technology in the classroom, it should relate in some fashion back to the technology plan and contribute to achieving the goals set forth within the plan. The technology plan can be thought of as a line item on the school budget so that the plan is well funded and thought of as such. Especially when shifting from outsourced help to internal departments, finding solid staff is crucial.

The staff you need to hire for sure (based on a school district the size of my alma mater, Northampton) is a Director of Technology. This is the technology coordinator we have been learning about all semester. The technology coordinator would coordinate and supervise all aspects of the technology department. He or she will be responsible for working toward the goals set forth in the district technology plan. He or she will work with curriculum design and implementation of technology into learning environments. He or she will be responsible for training and evaluating staff, faculty, and students. He or she will set expectations and enforce them, be responsible for assisting in development of web-based courses and advise in the selection of efficient instructional technology for the district. For a district like Northampton which covers a large area, you need two technology support staff members to split evenly among the districts four elementary schools. Over time, it would be ideal to have one support staff in each school. These support staff would be responsible providing technical and educational support to teachers and students in the schools they are assigned. They will assist in the design of instructional environments using technology to enhance learning. They will assist in training and evaluating teachers, students, and also assist administrators. Northampton has an advantage in that the Middle School and High School is on the same campus and are connected. The technology coordinator would be based here as well as two technology support staff. Lastly, we cannot forget about the network technicians. We need at least two. The network centers around the high school but support is needed at all schools. The network technicians are responsible for the nitty-gritty infrastructure of the district network. They are responsible for network and server administration and maintenance and are supervised by the technology coordinator.

Finally and perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle is the cost. The salary range for technology coordinator according to www.salary.com is between $70,000 and $110,000. Our technology coordinator would most likely fall near the upper side of that range due to the amount of responsibility he is being given. Support staff on average make between $45,000 and $75,000. Our support staff will most likely fall in the middle. Network technicians average between $37,000 and $50,000. In order to hire quality network technicians, I would expect to offer a starting salary of $43,000. But the final numbers look like this: A school district like Northampton could end up spending between $324,000 and $510,000 a year on a staff like this. Certainly cheaper than outsourcing. Even to outsource properly I would hope a school district would still be employing some support staff.

Wikibook Update

This past week was spent continuing to research various sources online and in hard copy. The course textbook has proven to be a fantastic resource as well thus far. I have accumulated a good handful of online sources as well which I have bookmarked on my home computer.

I started compiling much of the information I have found and have begun putting together some brief snippets and main ideas that will become the content for our wikibook chapter. Tonight before class at 6pm my group will be meeting to discuss our final version of our chapter outline and assign sections for each of us. We will all start adding content within the next week and hopefully be able to use the rest of the semester to add and revise our main dump of content before it is due in its "final" form.

TP5 :: Imaging 500 New Laptops

Computer cloning or imaging appears at first glance to be a topic many people know about. Upon further reading into many other sources both online and hard copy, it became apparent to me that the best way for me to learn about this process on a scale of 500 laptops is probably to actually try to do it.

What I mean by that? The imaging process gives you the ability to "clone" a computer, meaning copy an entire hard drive and its settings to another hard drive as an image rather than having to install multiple programs multiple times making installation time astronomically high and costly. On a smaller level, I found that you can take a new hard drive, insert it into the computer with the old drive and use any one of few software applications to actually perform the imaging process. You copy the image of the old hard drive to the new hard drive, then take out the old drive and boot from the new drive and it's just like booting from the old drive except now (in many cases) you have more space. Simple enough, but yet certainly not practical for setting up 500 laptops.

The second option is available from ImageMASSter. The ImageMASSter 6007SAS is a cloning station where you can image up to seven hard drives at the same time from one hard drive. This model supports many types of hard drives including SATA/SCSI/IDE as well as others. This option is certainly much more efficient than cloning one drive at a time, but this still doesn't seem quite effective enough for 500 laptops.

The final option I found was to clone over a network. However, I cannot seem to find any documentation for cloning a typical windows or mac operating system over a network. I found many sources that were based on Linux platforms and used ssh to perform the cloning, however I do not believe many schools employ Linux as a primary operating system yet. For about $60, you can purchase an application known as Symantec's Norton Ghost. Ghost seems to be the most widely referred to software program for computer cloning, especially when cloning over a network. This is absolutely the way to image 500 laptops. Using the server as the main drive image and loading that image onto each of the 500 laptops can be done simultaneously. Also, as long as the computers are attached to the network, if there are any problems with any of the machines, you can simply load the server image fresh onto the problem machine. Unfortunately, in terms of open-source software for cloning, there really isn't much if any for cloning on such a large scale. The freeware programs that do exist often come with restrictions including new hard drives cannot be larger than the original drive which is a major setback. Cloning over the network however even spending the money on Ghost is far more efficient and cost effective than any other means of imaging 500 laptops or any amount of computers on a network.