The Committed Sardine Blog

Ian Jukes is the Director of the InfoSavvy Group, an international consulting group that provides leadership and program development in the areas of assessment and evaluation, strategic alignment, curriculum design and publication, professional development, planning, change management, hardware and software acquisition, information services, customized research, media services, and on-line training as well as conference keynotes and workshop presentations

Our Schools are Leaking

Read this challenging article and then spend some time thinking about the future direction of education.

Classroom Performance System

Have you seen Classroom Performance System? Some of our teachers have used an innovative combination of Microsoft Powerpoint and either classroom televisions or digital projectors. CPS takes it a step further.

InterWrite Tablets

We're looking at innovative methods in the delivery of classroom instruction. One such method employs a product called InterWrite. InterWrite is similar to the SmartBoard technologies of a few years ago with some interesting new twists.

Sage a Feed Reader For Firefox

RSS newsfeeds are an increasingly popular method of getting your message out whether it's the daily news or the morning annoucements. An RSS feed has just been added to our school district's website in a bid to provide yet another way for students, parents, alumni and others to learn what's what's going on at our school district.

Sage Feed Reader is an addon for folks who use Firefox as a web browser. Check it out. It's free and it's easy to use.

Kurzweil

This summer we purchased five licenses to support the Kurzweil 3000 reading, writing and learning software for students with special needs in our school district.

Kurzweil 3000^TM is the premier reading, writing and learning software for struggling students, including individuals with dyslexia, learning difficulties, or those who are English Language Learners.

Kurzweil 3000 supports the teaching and learning of reading skills that are necessary for meeting state and federal mandates.

Because Kurzweil 3000 is also content independent, teachers in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges alike use it to help students succeed in the classroom regardless of curriculum or lesson plan.

New Look Website

At the request of our new Superintendent, Mr. Dennis Johnson, we've renovated our district website to be a more information filled location on the world wide web. More developments will be forthcoming. Stay tuned.

PolyCom Units come to Franklinville

This summer we receive a new mobile distance learning cart. It's got a digital projector, sound system, dvd/vcr player and a PolyCom camera. This new cart will support distance learning in any classroom in either building. The mobile cart will be housed in our elementary school. The high school will receive a fixed PolyCom unit that is included in our renovated distance learning facility on the second floor of the high school.

New Mobile Computer Labs

Both our Elementary and High School Students will be using 48 new laptop computers. All of these computers are equipped with built in wireless networking. We have replaced the behemoth mobile cart in the high school with 3 much lighter and more mobile carts which will reside in our redesigned high school computer lab.

We hope to purchase 3 similar carts for the elementary school to replace the cumbersome cart that we used to move from classroom to classroom.

Lotus Notes 7

This week we undertook the upgrade of our electronic mail system. We switched all our content to a new server that we purchased at the end of May 2006. It replaced a server that was five years old. Our new server has more power and is supporting Domino 7 Server for Lotus Notes. If you are a web user of our email system you will begin to notice a change in what your used to seeing. Follow the link above to read more of the features of Lotus Notes 7.

School Wires

Webs That Work from BOCES could be in our future. Take a look at this site

OSI Model

The OSI or Open Systems Interconnect model is the "Krebs Cycle" of network computing. Most of our users are really only aware of what is occurring at Layer 7 or the application layer. There are however six other layers that network adminstrators and micro-computer technical support specialists must be intimately aware of to bring you the level of service that you have grown to expect as "netizens" of the Information Age. This article from Wikipedia provides the most concise overview of the topic I have seen recently.

Teleflip

Teleflip is a free service that allows you to send a text message to a friend or relative's cell phone. It's very simple to do and by following the link above you can read more about this service. You can use any email client to send the message. I've used Yahoo Mail, Lotus Notes and Evolution to send messages.

Real Time Satellite Tracking

Would you like to know where all the communications satellites are relative to your own position? Now, thanks to Google that is possible. Follow the link above.