Tactical View of Implementing Brower Co Public Schools by Gerald Flournoy

– Gerald
Flournoy is veteran of 20 years in IT, is vice-president for technology
solutions, the millennium group
– senior
systems engineer for apple 6 years
–
company is now singularly focused on integrating technology in K-12
space

tactical perspective

Broward
–
more than 274K studetns
budget in 04-05:
$4.15 billion

Overview of
technology
– about 100K
devices
– 251
schools
– run SAP for
HR/Payroll
– rolling out
MySAP

Student Info System is cobol
based
– about 80%
macintosh

question: how to you make
all these different vendors and technologies communicate together and make these
vendors work together

by developing
an open technology model and driving your vendors toward that
model

if a program is out there: is
it Mac/Linux compatible
– same user
experience across all platforms?

want
to preserve choice and
interoperability

have a district
policy on cross platform
solutions

Broward Co uses
eAgenda

Host on Demand is IBM product
that feeds info directly from
AS4000

RiverDeep has developed
learning system based on websphere to help teachers integrate technology
effectively in the
curriculum

Illuminate is a
crossplatform soluation that can be utilized on multiple
platforms

– interface of Elluminate
Live! interface
— emulates the classroom
environment, as students log on you can see
them
— shared whiteboard
environment
— students can type
text
— have voice over IP even at
dialup

Can conduct web tours through
Elluminate
– can conduct realtime
feedback

Firstclass
tool
– have 40,000 users on 2 servers, can
do realtime chat, email, system can accept voicemail and
faxes
– it is much less expensive than
competition that is out there
– stable,
scalable, supports open standards, cell phone
WAP
– has folders so you are not sending
the message multiple times, can send the reference to others, not the entire
message

district is now exploring
option of setting up LDAP directory structure for everything, to pave the way
for single sign on

Have district wide
implementation of
ARD

LANdesk
–
is supporting Mac OS X as well as OS
9

ManageSoft
–
has more K-12 focus

H.264 is upcoming
technology
– now looking at taking board
meetings, encoding them, tagging them with quicktime chapter tracks to jump to a
particular spot in the board
meeting

iChat with H.264 will have
much improved quality and framerate, as well as supporting up to 4 simultaneous
videochats