Once again I find myself remiss with the posting of this daily soujourn into the frightening realm of educational technology. How's that for some fancy words? In all honesty I have been traveling quite a bit more in the winter months than at any other time during the year. I had been living primarily in one spot over the course of the last six months therefore the posting was an easy exercise to complete. Not so much when you travel for an hour or so, eat, walk the dogs, and whatever else I seem to have to do each night and then if I have any energy left, I will write something. So I do apologize and no, I am not sick or is there anything else wrong, mentally or physically I just have not had any free time.
There is so much to catch up on I really don't know what to start with so I will move to the area that seems to be taking the most time to get finished and that would be the media centers at GTPS. After some very careful consideration I have decided to not go with the Terminals in the centers. First and foremost, some of the curriculum software does not run on the Terminal Server and just to get it to work would be very time comsuming and probably cost more than it would be worth. Instead we are going with some refurbished Pentium III 1.0 Ghz Dell GX150's in both Roland and Smithville. The rooms at Arthur Rann and Reeds Road are a mixture of Pentium III and IV's that we have either built or purchased over the last few years. There are sixteen units at Rann, twenty-four at Reeds, and twenty each at Roland and Smithville. Rann has a training center with twenty-four and both Roland and Smithville should be able to be upgraded to twenty four untis each after some additional electrical work in completed in the summer of 05. We have the units in and Gary is working on an image for them. I know he will complete the image quickly in addition to several other hundred tasks I seem to have handed him over the past month or so. I guess I have been just loading the wagon and not worrying abou the horse with Gary for the better part of six straight months and hopefully he can catch somewhat of a break over the Christmas holidays with some not so busy days while everyone else is out on vacation or time off. He had discovered some slight problems at Rann last week but came to a solution this afternoon so it would appear that Rann should be done by the end of this short week. I have to meet with White Harris in the morning to discuss our switch to the TLS services this February. They will need to transport the signal that is now captured and sent over the ATM network, to a LAN connection that will run through the Pleasantville Verizon CO. With any luck we will be the first folks up on the TLS system and it will give our two "out of campus" larger elementary schools a 100 Mbps connection back to our network in the main building. That will leave me with the four smaller elementary schools still on the WAN ATM connection which will just have to do. The cost of the new system will be approximately $1,800 more per month but it has become a crucial matter since the lack of a high speed connection has caused us some very big problems within the operation of our student management and file storage systems this past few weeks. I am cutting back on some other purchases to make up the difference and Verizon has assured me that the connection will be supported through our E-Rate funding "fingers are crossed when I say that", so as the communications grants come in I will put them to work in other areas. After the phone meeting I have to get together with our copier rep from Canon, George Jacob and wrap up what should be approved at the
BOE meeting in GTPS tonight. The copier deal with Canon is nothing short of great for us and will serve to increase copies and substantially increase service throughout the district. My compliments go out to George and the amount of work that he went through to help us out with this dilemma. He could have left me sit in the old contracts and just wait them out but he went above and beyone to keep the deal alive until he could pull it off.
After that meeting if there is anytime Gary and I have to go over the state of the state with regards to virus, backup, operations, tapes, tickets and anything else that we are doing on a day to day basis. We have a very big BOE technology meeting on December 9th at 5:30 in the evening so that each of the board members that are involved in technology can attend for more than the obligitory forty-five minute briefing that is normally the case. In the upcoming months there will be many decisions that will effect the technology program at GTPS either for the better or worse and they need to be fully briefed in order to make informed decisions on the issues. It is sometimes important to remember that life is not run on a series of bullets and that you do need to develve into the detail sometimes in order to become informed.
If I have anytime after that I will move the necessary tables and such to Smithville and will bring the crew over there on Weds. of this week to get at least three hours in after twelve so that we can get the monitors unboxed and the furniture put together once and for all. We can meet during the work session and map out the rest of this month and the month of December. I have some specifics that need to be addressed and I am sure that they will pose some very tight deadlines but we need to meet them all. I need to have a good solid start to the beginning of the second half of the school year. January, February, and March need to go much smoother that September, October, and November have. I have no fear about April, May, and June since that is primarily the best time of the year for catch up and summer implementation planning.
That is it for tonight since I will try to catch up on Weds. of this week. I have a few software items to discuss as well. Till next post.
8:02:04 PM 
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