Leveraging Technology for Student Achievement

Leveraging Technology for Student Achievement

Information Technology Blueprint for Broward County Public Schools
http://customers.celtcorp.com/bets

theme for district: transforming education one student at a time

Broward’s Technology Blueprint
TASA 2005

Broward is in Ft Lauderdale area
Just been in education for 6 months

3 C’s
– Connectivity
– Collaboration
– Communication

hardware solutions for managing packets on the network:
– packet hound
– packet shaper

Vericept: looks for suspicious packets in real time

Veritas: storage central
– also watches packets on WAN

5th largest school district in US
390K employees, over 274K students
– have 250+ switches in the campuses
– have a gig of bandwidth between schools
– have 10 megs of internet bandwidth for each campus to the internet, are working toward getting 100 megs per campus
– one of the largest schools with 300+ videoconferencing units, doing it all with IP

background in chemistry and mathematics

role of CIO very challenging, esp in K-12 environment
– budget cuts
– where tech is going: lots of change
– continual challenge to restructure and
– how do we inform constituents about technology activities?

Need to integrate technology into teaching and learning process, bottom line is student achievement

How do we leverage data to make decisions?
– how use tech as a catalyst for change?
– given limited funds, if tech is applied effectively you can get a lot from it

Want to create a collaborative environment to bring people together

Goal: All schools will have equitable resources

graphic for 21st century learning: shows discrete content areas, divided into
_ technology competencies
– process skills
– content objectives

Pilot for 1 to 1 in Broward county started in 6 schools
– create very learner-centric environment, students learn at their own pace

Steps in creating a technology blueprint
– 1st: did needs analysis (technology assessment: current reality)
– 2nd: define vision blueprint
– 3rd: gap analysis and transformation plan

Looking at $100 million a year for next 5 years, taking existing IT budgets and reallocating the budgets rather than looking for new monies
– have spent 3 years doing this technology assessment with consultants, now there are 85 different projects Broward is working on implementing

plan is very detailed, has objectives, timelines, and desired results
– all of this info is available online at a website TBA

Project areas / layers
– knowledge management
-business instructional applications
– data and tools
– infrastructure

Always seems to be a disconnect in communications between teachers/principals and technology group
– want technology group to be more customer focused / geared
–

School districts should be running like a business, streamline like a business
– should look for savings, run it like a better business
– to meet the vision, new IT skil sets are required
– new ETS positions: manager of information security, project manager, conferencing services manager, instructional technology manager

Previoius positions
– director of business and decision support
– director of quality and customer service

has been disconnect between curriculum and technology, manager of instructional technology is supposed to serve as that bridge

convergence with audio, video and data is big: running all this data through the network: videoconferencing, distance learning, etc.

when you make changes at technology support level, also need to make changes at the school level
– need person at school level who can leverage

Getting email situation wtih email links to messages, rather than sending large attachments,
– want a system that puts that on the network and then sends people links instead of documents

using an open technology model, looking at where industry is heading
– new technology directioin: Open networks (TCP/IP), open publishing with HTML and XHTML, Open Data with XML and JDBC, open programming with J2EE, UML, and Eclipse, Open Interchange with Web Services, Open OS with Linux

Vendors tend to charge a lot with maintenance and support
– Linux offers SO MUCH relative to what a lot of vendor provided solutions are (like Win XP)

create open environment using one device to enhance communication

Key components of educational technology
– move toward enterprise portal: a single gateway to personalized information
— helps us make informed decisions, customized and personalized
— teacher has their own portal page, that is where we want to go

most systems now have good data warehouse, can get info, if you have an open standards platform you can use the portal as a viewing mechanism and do data mining, looking for relationships between different data sources

application vendors on curriculum sides have CLOSED systems (CCC, Pearson, etc)
– problem is you can’t get data out
– by making systems open, you can get data out, do benchmarking
– want to track a student K-12 to identify where the deficiencies are
– creating 1 enterprise portal for all users
– providing a uniform view of information
– Can get info when you need it, how you need it
– knits together all applications, creates streamlined interface (all work done behind the scene, customized page

Key slide: Learning Enterprise Architecture: Surround Strategy
– elements are: information delivery, data warehouse, new technologies and service, information management
– how do we leverage existing infrastructure and build around it? key question
– need ways to make mainframe existing systems more user friendly, creating graphical user interfaces to existing “green screens”
– letting parents log into a parental page to view attendance data and other info
– with intergrated system, can use data/intelligence that is there and get to info we need, for purchasing, etc.

Takes about 2 weeks from time a principal orders a ream of paper
– is costing $150 to generate a PO now, can streamline procurement process to take time from 2 weeks down to 1 day
– costs about $5 to write a single check
– goal is to take that down to $2-$3
– vendors want our business, if we can make them electronic that speeds things up, that is good

All departments have small databases and that creates inefficiencies
– so we are trying to eliminate that and centralize data in data warehouse

Want to put a wrapper around old, outdated technologies
– collaborative tools, document management, etc

Noticed there we different applications (4 tools) for accessing the AS4000, now are moving to a single client
– for reporting, state and federal guidelines are very stringent
– can get better data

this architecture is better for integrating disparate learning systems

Partnering with Microsoft to create a “portlet” including “Project Management Office” (PMO)
– want to create different portlets

working toward single-sign on
– connect to all the systems you need access to
– central software distribution management system

network operations center proactively monitoring network activity
– security and reliability is a requirement
– enviromment is always on and must be always available

Schematic of NOC: can log in and see
– have over 3000 network devices, can see bandwidth utilization, response time for different mission critical elements
– from remote desktop, sends a transaction to one of the mainframes and
– can proactively increase the bandwidth to different campuses as needed
– this is a “dashboard view”

CAN: Community Access Network (Extended learning to the community)
– did pilot last year, got their own spectrum from FCC to deploy their own wireless networks
– put up transimission towers on school, had backup wireless network for schools, can do video and audio on this shared network
– partners like CISCO and IBM
– also reaching out to business community,, taking old outdated computers, refurbish them and add a wireless card
— then sending that home with title I kids or to title 1 campuses, giving them free internet access at home

Bridging the digital divide: teachers work in after school programs
– lots of software donated by vendors so computers can be resent out to kids in community, idea of bridging the digitial divide, giving to the needy

District spends over $200 million per year on textbook
– now looking at moving to a model for electronic textbook publishing

Information Technology Blueprint for Broward County Public Schools
http://customers.celtcorp.com/bets

have 110,000+ computers, 70% macs
– LAN desk and Managesoft are crossplatform
– IBM software called director let them do that for servers

COSN has great TCO model we have implemented

Right now are providing home internet access for 4 schools
– free dialup through Bell-South

if you get erate funding you can’t traverse the network

uses HP Open view for NOC dashboard view

addressing student internet access at home:
– have a filtering mechanism in place: try to get to local server
– use Open sourc eDanze, content barrier from intego

Data warehouse has been in existance for 11 years, run on AS400 mainframe
– key is the data dictionary: have this available to other districts, can move it to SQL or ORACLE system
– creating the portal and the reporting can then happen

are working now on legislation to use textbook dollars for technology
– sees TIVO type techologies, voice logs, other technologies as converging for future
– concepts of visual reality, getting superimposed language translation with wearable virtual devices

My thoughts:
– focus/issue when it comes to content filtering on the network should not just be: how do we control what people do on the network when they are at school?
– that is an important question, but not the fundamental question (most important)
– most important: how do we create / cultivate an environment that encourages responsible and accountably computer use?

just like he showed creating this live webpages / portlets, we need to have students using tools like mySQL and PHP to create these kind of interactive web services
– key is dynamic, web based access to information

idea of other attendees, that we need a device that bridges the PDA and the laptop is off base
– assumes that we just need a text delivery device for 21st century learning
– we must afford opportunity for students to create their own multimedia