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(In addition to teaching chem and physics, one of my duties is to direct the school district's technology
program.)
The members of the Ed-Co school board have been very supportive of our technology efforts over the
years. While there is not an overabundance of money, the board has gone out of its way to make sure that we can provide our
kids with the best technology opportunities possible. That has helped tremendously in allowing us to try to keep current
technology in the hands of the kids.
Here's our overall setup in a nutshell:
The elementary
school is in Colesburg 12 miles from the secondary school in Edgewood. Each building has its own document server and wireless
network. The two networks are completely separate--we would like to combine them via wireless cross-country technology, but
that is far too expensive and unreliable at present.
Each Ed-Co center is served by a wireless network operating
at 56mbps (802.11g standard).
Our primary operating systems for staff and secondary students are Mac OS X 10.4
"Tiger" and 10.5 "Leopard," and our productivity software is MS Office 2004 Mac--Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
The Mac version of Office is compatible with Windows versions. Also available to secondary students and staff is Adobe Creative
Suite 2--Indesign, Photoshop, Acrobat Pro., Illustrator, and GoLive.
We have 3 twenty-computer wireless mobile
labs in the secondary (7-12 300 kids) featuring Mac G-3 and G-4 iBooks running OSX 10.4.x, and MacBooks running OS 10.5.x.
Each mobile lab cart has a small laser printer that can be connected via one of the Ethernet drops in our classrooms. We
have a 20 Mac business lab, a 20 Mac computer lab, and 20 Macs in the IMC. Each teacher in the district has a Mac laptop
14" G-4 new this past summer. There are twelve older iMacs in the physics lab, and fifteen Windows XP computers in the
vocational agriculture lab. All computers are networked and Internet accessible.
We
have two mobile labs in the elementary (K-6 300 kids) which consist of 20 G-4 iBooks running OSX 10.4.x, and 20 MacBooks running
OS 10.5.x. The elementary computer lab has 26 desktop iMacs running OS9/OSX, and there is a student accessible desktop iMac
in every classroom. There is a 6-computer minilab in the TAG room, and a 6 computer minilab in the resource room, both with
older iMacs.
The elementary labs are used to allow Internet access in the classroom, for project work, for music
classes to use Notepad to compose and play back music... The elem mobile lab is used an average of 2 hrs per day.
The secondary labs are used for similar activities, plus algebra D&P software, physics tutorials and simulations,
desktop publishing, various media classes, Geometer's Sketchpad in the math dept., planning meals and designing menus
for our student-run restaurant. One of our social studies teachers has students use the mobile lab when they take essay tests
so they can write better, and he can read what has been written! The three secondary mobile labs are used an average of 4.5
hours per day.
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