Going the Distance!
May 2006
Newsletter Articles:
Greetings from GCI SchoolAccess
This monthly newsletter is designed to provide helpful news and tips to teachers, administrators and school technology coordinators. This is the last newsletter for the school year. Our next issue will be distributed in the fall. Have a great summer vacation!
Alaska Students Get Face Time with Senator Murkowski
On April 27, students throughout the state of Alaska were given the opportunity to ask questions to Senator Lisa Murkowski face-to-face via videoconferencing hosted on GCI's SchoolAccess Distance Learning Service (DLS). For the second year running, the Alaska Distance Learning Partnership (ADLP) offered this educational enrichment opportunity for students to practice civic-mindedness while giving them direct access to their legislator in Washington, D.C. It also provided a chance for Senator Murkowski to address the questions and concerns of some of her youngest constituents.
For more information about ADLP, please visit http://www.alaskadistancelearning.org.
If your organization is doing something exciting or unique with distance learning technology, we would like to know about it so we can feature it an upcoming newsletter. Your input is extremely helpful to other teachers and technology coordinators who can learn from your experiences. Please e-mail Jeremy Bartram with details of your distance learning successes.
Alaska Applies for Pilot Program in School Accountability
The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development is seeking an additional way of tracking its students' academic progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It has recently applied to the U.S. Department of Education to pilot a growth model that will help determine the progress made within each school. This new growth model tracks individual students' achievement year to year and give schools credit for student improvement. For example, the academic performance of a school's fifth-graders on the state's standards-based assessments would be compared with that of the same students when they were fourth-graders. The advantage of the growth model is that it distinguishes between the students that are proficient and those who are not. This model will help those schools that are improving but are not meeting the proficiency targets to determine what instructional changes they need to make. If Alaska's pilot is approved it will be applied for tests taken this year.
Source: Alaska Department of Education & Early Development
http://www.eed.state.ak.us/news/releases/2006_02/pilot_prog_in_school_accountability.pdf
Technology Teacher Honored
The Alaska Society for Technology in Education named Academy Charter School teacher Bob Frost its 2006 State Technology Teacher of the Year. Frost has been teaching computer skills to students in kindergarten through sixth grade for more than two decades. He is known as the "technology guru" by his colleagues. Frost has spent a large part of his career bringing technology into the schools across the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District. Frost was one of two teachers in the early 1980's that traveled from school to school sharing information about the future of computers in schools with teachers and staff. Frost says his goal as a computer teacher today is "getting the kids and the skills together. They all have computers at home and they all know how to get to the Internet. But I'm trying to teach them how they can use it for study skills and what I'd call product work: how to write graphics, how to make charts, and also just enjoying and using technology," he said, "because [computers] are not going away."
Source: Anchorage Daily News
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7641643p-7553303c.html
State Funding to the Rescue
According to a report from the National Governors Association (NGA), federal funding for education is expected to drop next year making school leaders have to turn to state funds. However, at least 37 states report improving budget scenarios for the upcoming year. Many state governors are proposing new educational technology programs and other school initiatives as a result. According to the NGA report, the most common proposals to improve education this coming year are teacher quality and teacher compensation. The plans focus on increasing teacher pay, including several suggestions to institute performance-based compensation systems. Another proposal is to improve high schools by focusing on progressing student preparation for college.
Source: eSchool News http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6258&page=2
10 Ways to Juice Up Your Network
Joshua Feinberg, co-founder of Computer Consulting 101, which provides business development for network consultants and computer consultants for small companies, has come up with a list of 10 ways to make your network work faster. For a more in depth explanation for each tip click the link at the bottom of this section.
1. Invest in new equipment
Many switches, routers and hubs, primarily at small companies, were added before Y2K and haven't been upgraded since. Buying now can boost your network.
2. Examine bandwidth availability and pricing
3. Stop being stingy with storage
Storage area networks and network-attached storage devices are big bargains now, and managing them has never been easier. Give your users the storage capacity they need in 2006.
4. Continue to "harden" the network
Protections are available through Windows, Microsoft Office and various anti-virus and anti-spyware programs but are worthless if not updated to battle the ever-burgeoning threats. Systems should be set up to download and install the latest patches as soon as they become available.
5. Employ automated resource monitoring
6. Be proactive with users and managers
7. Consider new applications that reduce data entry
8. Employ e-mail consolidation and acceleration technologies
E-mail consolidation and acceleration technologies download the e-mails, but don't download attachments unless the recipient clicks on the attachment.
9. Use wide area file services
10. Use data reduction/pattern matching
This enables appliances sitting at different points of the WAN to exchange only the changes in a file (i.e., a Web page with real-time information) rather than entire file.
Source: School CIO, http://www.schoolcio.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=183702330
Upcoming Events
U.S. Department of Education is Offering 14 Regional Workshops for Teachers to Learn Best Practices
Date: June through August
Location: Various locations throughout the Nation
The U.S. Department of Education is holding 14 Teacher-to-Teacher regional workshops this summer that will help teachers learn from fellow educators who have had success in raising student achievement throughout the country.
For more information, dates and registration please visit http://www.t2tweb.us/Workshops/Registration.asp.
Registrations are being processed on a first-come, first-served basis, and space is limited.
