July 20th, 2007
My fall wishlist
Of course I’m running late turning in my purchase orders for next year. I guess I’ll get to it after vacation. I turned in a spreadsheet with budget estimates in May. What do they want? My first born? Oh well. At least it got me thinking again about my wishlist for the fall.
Our Big Brothers from the state think we should be adding more digital whiteboards. I tested a Mimeo board last year and have two to install this summer, but I can’t say that any more are on my wishlist. Don’t get me wrong, they’re pretty cool and I’ve certainly found that they can be useful, but for the price, we can buy a lot of digital projectors and teachers can produce a lot of PowerPoints that are just as easily posted online as images from whiteboards.
Speaking of producing PowerPoints, we’re now up to about 75-80% of our teachers who use their laptops very extensively for preparing class materials, posting materials to the web, communicating with students and parents, and presenting/demonstrating in class. Thus, our three-year old laptops have seen better days. Cracked cases, small screens, and slow performance are plaguing these tools that have become indispensable. At least for our power users, a tech refresh is definitely on my wishlist.
I’d love to roll out Google Apps for Education and replace our existing email infrastructure. The collaboration and groupware tools in Google Apps would be a great fit for us, but the real item on my wishlist is the time to make this happen.
Which leads me to the next item on my wishlist - A new ISP. ISPs with 99.99% uptime are certainly available. I’d like one of those. The transition to a new ISP would be a great time to move to Google Apps, since our current ISP handles most of our email (except for all of the teachers who just use their own accounts, which needs to stop pretty soon given new electronic communication rules).
Toner is definitely on my list too. A lot of toner. Now that my users have discovered the joys of high-speed networked laser printers instead of crappy inkjets (”but it sits right on my desk and it’s so convenient” - ugh), the toner goes quickly. Not as fast as inkjet cartridges, but pretty fast. Better yet, how about a staff who realizes that we don’t need to print out every bloody paper we ever type? Ever heard of projecting a test on the new digital projectors? How about the tools to give mini-quizzes in class? Like the new ASUS subnotebooks coming out this fall!
Finally, I really need to find someone to donate a server that I can use to do a more widespread Edubuntu and/or SLEDUCATOR rollout/test/comparison (no reason you can’t dual boot a server, right?). The single P4 “servers” in my basement just aren’t going to cut it in a classroom and the server I had in mind has already been claimed by our new library software. Oh well.
What’s on your fall wishlist?
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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