wireless | ~ Mark's Musings ~ blog.markwcarbone.ca

I enter the 2010-2011 school year with great anticipation and excitement. Many of the projects that were in major planning stages last year will ‘go live’ this year.

Effective today, we have wifi hot spots in each secondary school. These hot spots will allow staff and students to use their own equipment for Internet access.
Expanded use of web 2.0 and social media tools to support curriculum delivery. Staff and students now have access to Facebook. Facebook and Twitter, along with other resources will be used to extend school community and support curriculum delivery.
By mid month, we will role out email for elementary students. In addition to the secondary role out last April, all students fill have a Board assigned email address to support curriculum and communication needs, and identification in other online environments. All students will be part of our FirstClass system.
Launching our Future Forum project (semester 2), developed as our 2009/2010 PLP project
Automated processes now reduce manual work to support account management
Redesigned and significantly improved drupal based web sites for our secondary schools
Moodle hosted setup to deliver Health and Safety content (launched Sept. 2nd)

Significant projects for this year include:

expanded development of our Library Learning Commons (LLC) project
a complete rewrite of our Technology Acceptable Use procedure to align with Digital Code of Conduct, Digital Citizenship, and Character Development programs
iPads & netbooks in the classroom
continued involvement in the PLP program
a look at e-book strategies
expanding our wireless project
building on our Digital Citizenship program

Day one went well. We hit our startup targets and hit the road running. It is going to be a great year!

~ Mark

A new school year launches into high gear today as all of our students return to class. Based on our successes and planning last year, I fully anticipate an exciting 2009/2010 school year. Predictably, there will be thousands of things that happen in every IT department from day to day operations, planned projects and dealing with that unexpected situation or challenge that jumps out to push back against even the most thorough plan.

An overview of major projects on deck for our Board includes:

maintaining and refining our new active directory domain structure
expanded use of our new enterprise management tool (imaging, software & patch deployment)
deploying our OSX/XP dual boot Macs with blade server back end
school network upgrades
starting our network access control project
starting our new wireless project
new library resources and process
greater use of Adobe Connect
moving forward with Digital Citizenship initiatives
iPods in the classroom projects
hosted web pages for teachers

Of course, this list does cover all of the work, but sets a solid agenda to keep moving major initiatives forward, particularly in the instructional area. I will share updates as we work our way through the project list.

On a more personal note, I will be