Brad from Oregon Episcopal School kindly invited us to visit, and next week we will be pleased to return the favor. I was reminded how powerful it is to visit other schools in town. Thanks to Brad, Brad, Jeff, and Deri for welcoming us.

We walked through the middle school, encountering small groups of students working togethet with laptops in the hall outside their classes. One group was writing, another developing spoken recordings in GarageBand. In the upper school, both computer labs we saw were fully occupied with busy students, and posters demonstrated exemplary work in 3D modeling -- especially landscapes and buildings. The upper school office was very quiet -- just adopt a 1:1 program to make that place take off!

Some specific items I learned.

- OES has run deployment through Altiris for five years, as have we. It's time to put our heads together to share tips.

- They are handling middle school Apple laptops using Workgroup Manager, which we are going to undertake this summer.

- Brad is writing a document retention policy, which we would like to undertake this year.

- OES is experimenting with TiVo, as we have this year.

- OES is looking at XO and eeePC as possible low-cost mobile lab solutions.

- OES is thinking of moving some students' school accounts to GMail to take advantage of email, file storage, and collaborative document authorship.

- They are evaluating Higher Ground laptop bags for their MacBooks.

- They use current year operating funds to purchase computers for the following year, permitting maximum flexibility when timing purchases.

I am sure there was tons more. We look forward to welcoming the crew to Catlin Gabel next week.

Director of Technology

The Putney School, a progressive secondary boarding school, has an opening for a Director of Technology. The job provides considerable scope for innovative leadership within a forward looking educational community.

The Director will:
• Oversee school-wide data structures, policies and procedures;
• Provide vision and strategic direction to the department;
• Oversee and manage technology staff;
• Work with all major departments (i.e. Development, Admissions, etc.) to make the best use of technology
• Manage budgets;
• Oversee inventory and planned refresh of the infrastructure;
• Develop and maintain a strategic plan (both academic and administrative);
• Cultivate vendor relationships;
• Be a portal into the rest of the technology world (i.e. professional development, site visits, staying current on new technologies and “best practices”);
• Act as an “internal consultant” to the Director, Trustees, faculty, students and parents.
• Be able to step in where needed for network administration, solving problems as they arise, and working with teachers in the academic realm.

The ideal candidate:
• Has interest and demonstrated ability in an educational setting, sense of humor, flexibility, energy, collegiality, and the ability to work effectively with a team.
• Has the ability to learn quickly and teach effectively
Minimum requirements:
• At least two years in a comparable supervisory and management position.
• Excellent communication skills
• Strong technical skills

The Putney School seeks to promote diversity in its program and hiring. We recognize that a diverse faculty and staff is crucial to the success and continued relevance of the school.

Please send a cover letter, resume and list of references by April 10, 2008 to:

Emily Jones, Director
ejones@putneyschool.org




tags: job

Last year, we rolled out three high-cost, high-maintenance systems: Cisco Clean Access (wireless network security), Follett Destiny (library system), and NutriKids (lunchroom point of sale). This year, we have none to roll out, which should feel extremely pleasant by comparison! Not only can we afford to slow down innovation after our big push last year, but we are also changing our strategy for how we meet requests for high-end systems. For the main Catlin Gabel web site, we are considering going open-source (Drupal), which could save thousands in development or acquisition costs. For network security, we are considering using ubiquitous technologies (WPA, Radius) to control network access in case our expensive, proprietary system (Cisco Clean Access) fails to perform to expectations. For a number of smaller functions that require web support, such as the admission inquiry process or bookstore sales, I have written custom scripts to take the place of expensive, commercial solutions. In future years, we may take an open-source or custom approach to save thousands on our current job application system.

In some cases (network security in particular), we may only achieve 90% of the original, imagined functionality with the lower-cost solution, but that may end up being far preferable to assuming the financial and support burden of the high-end solution.

Cell phones and other mobile devices are more problematic. There doesn't appear to be a cheap way to provide mobile phone and data services to a school population. Once Skype-over-mobile-phone becomes more practical, perhaps we will see a better solution in this area. For the moment, we must choose between overspending and underproviding, neither of which are palatable options.

Now if only we could replace our 20 Windows servers with Linux!

Just finished a thrilling but atypically busy day -- I'll need another one of me to follow up on these items.

9:30: Met with networking company executives and our sysadmin to put Clean Access project back on track.

10:30: Met with Communications Director to budget for web site redesign (Drupal, anyone?)

11:30: Showed Globalization class how to create static pages in Drupal for "cultural icons" project.

1:00: Showed senior project students how to blog in Drupal.

1:30: Met with alumni office staff to add RSVP feature to Elgg-based alumni web site.

2:30: Helped students with tech support issues.

2:45: Met with middle school head to plan for tomorrow night's "Web 2.0 for parents."

3:30: Met with same networking company + sysadmin to review proposal for core switch upgrade.

4:30: Went for a run (good sanity measure).

Anyone catch a trend?

We are currently hiring for a support technician for our staff, and I am really enjoying the process of calling lots of candidates and hearing their stories. There's something about the high level of engagement that both parties to the conversation have, perhaps due to the need to represent yourself well, the excitement over a new future possibility, and the pleasure of learning from a professional peer. Onward we go, hoping to add a staff member within the next few weeks.

On a related note, I found out something interesting while writing up a justification for this position. Compared to our NAIS benchmark group, a dozen or so similar schools from around the country, we place in the upper quartile in number of staff devoted to tech support. This, we already knew -- we have a reputation for having a large IT department. However, we didn't know that we also place in the bottom quartile for number of instructional technology staff.

Outside the IT department, we have two computer studies teachers, one for the upper school and one for middle and lower schools. Andrew and Greg are pretty fully immersed in their teaching. Greg provides a good deal of academic technology integration advice to his colleagues, and Andrew maintains a number of powerful web scripts to make academic data visible to the faculty, but neither is primarily focused on academic technology integration. On average, other, similar schools have either a director of academic technology or teachers elsewhere in the school who have academic technology integration as their primary focus.

Our IT department assumes responsibility for both tech support and academic technology integration, which may explained why we're so darn busy all the time. Properly staffed, I think it will work nicely, as we very much enjoy working with teachers to identify technology solutions most appropriate to their pedagogical and curricular objectives.

Today's PNAIS All Schools Conference simply flew by. 700 attendees from northwest independent schools descended on Catlin Gabel today and were gone by 4:00. Our crack tech team supported dozens of presenters using installed data projectors, up to 50 people at one time connected to our new public wireless network, and we successfully recorded the five featured presenters (podcast files coming Monday). I organized a technology staff lunch and co-led two presentations, 1:1 Student Laptop Programs Today (with Jimi Robinson and Vicki Butler) and The Promise of Social Software In the Classroom (with Bill Fitzgerald).

I picked up a bunch of useful tips today. Jimi and Evergreen School are running a new type of student laptop program. They buy off-lease Dell laptop computers for $400 each and equip each classroom with a set. The schools owns all the machines, and students don't take them home. If a laptop really dies, that's okay, because they only spent $400 on it to begin with! As a green school, Evergreen takes pride in purchasing pre-used machines. Forest Ridge is in its twelfth year of student laptops! Mark Siegel of Delphian demonstrated Jott.com, a (currently) free service that allows you to pick up the phone, leave a voice message, and have transcriptionists in India transcribe the message into text and send it to the recipients of your choice!

As expected, many schools are considering laptop programs, and the huge amount of resources required to pull it off is the leading obstacle. Even more people are curious about social software in the classroom, and it was helpful to encourage people to identify the pedagogical objective first and then find the tool to best support it. One school had a problem unique to Idaho -- students on the ski mountain who need to stay abreast of classes happening back at school!

Cheryl from WA described an amazing children's multimedia installation in which she participated with the support of the University of Washington. TVs mounted on swingsets in a ton of sand -- it sounded great, and our media arts teacher wants to find out more about it.

Lou at OES is teaching second graders to program in Scratch -- reminds me of John Newsom's session from TechShare this past summer. It seems to have great potential to develop logic and problem-solving skills at this young age. It is also terribly fun!

I'm sure I neglected to mention a lot. It was great to host such a huge group, even if just for a day.

Some time ago, our systems administrator proposed a network freeze in the two weeks before faculty return to school. We would make no more changes to the network infrastructure without leaving sufficient time to test them before everyone came back and the year started. Well, today is the day, and I believe that we are within a day or so of meeting that deadline! Our team is nailing down the final details of how Macs will connect to Windows printer shares, and we flipped the switch on Cisco Network Access Control (a.k.a. Clean Access) this afternoon. About half of the file shares are moved from the old RAID array to the new, and I am wrapping up testing and loose ends on the half dozen or so web scripts I developed this summer. We are just in time, too, because our dedicated teachers are beginning to return from vacation to start preparations for the upcoming year. We are freezing the network configuration just in time.

While 35 of us attended a regional conference in Washington state, EduBloggerCon became one of the big stories at NECC. The two events had something in common -- participants in online networks found added value in face-to-face meetings. PNAIS TechShare participants mostly communicate through a listserv. This week's conference allowed us to put names to faces, meet old acquaintances, and intensively explore ideas that we had kicked around via email for months. EduBloggerCon participants expressed the same ideas. Bloggers who had spent the previous year reading and commenting on each others' posts found great value in sitting down with each other for an entire day.

Ad-hoc organization is an essential ingredient in such meet-ups. Participants show up having only loosely framed some essential questions or lined up a couple of internal speakers. Conversations twist and turn among different topics, keeping a high level of vitality and facilitating participation by many. Any participant can take the conversation in a new direction by asking a question, throwing a curveball into the discussion, or driving the data projector for a while.

I and many other members of such affinity networks profess that they have greater value for one's professional practice than traditional, highly organized conferences. Everyone seems to be doing it. BAISNet is a fine example of a group of education professionals who chat daily by email and then spontaneously organize informal meetings at one member's school when one topic appears particularly hot. Paul Nelson recently organized a Moodle meet-up at the NWRESD. And those are just the networks that I have found out about first-hand! I look forward to more of this high-value professional networking.

Students and teachers are all gone, and we are off to a quick start with our summer projects. The entire list is too long to reproduce here, but we have set an ambitious and optimistic agenda. We won't shed a tear if we don't finish some of them. We have a lot to show for just a few days into summer.

• Two veteran summer interns (Kaitlyn and Eric) on board
  
• 46 MacBook and 10 ThinkPad orders placed for incoming ninth graders. The families have been superb with getting their orders in on time, and the ratio of Macs to PCs is a huge swing from the previous class.
  
• Faculty/staff workstation transition plans complete
  
• Follett Destiny library system installed and running, with a few tweaks left to make
  
• The family directory for next year exported from Education Edge and ready for publication
  
• Sonicwall VPN concentrator in pilot phase. This works brilliantly as a web front-end to VPN -- no more client software to maintain!
  
• Admission inquiry web software in pilot
  
• Curriculum map data ported to mySQL as proof of concept
  
• Dant house data and signal cabling approved and installed. Projectors for Dant and Humanities have arrived, and I found a great Rolls mixer/amp for the classroom installations.
  
• Middle School summer reading forums set up for student conversations
  
• David H.'s wedding planned and ready to go!

I can't wait to see what next week will bring!

Our senior laptop check-in has gone smoothly so far this year. In two days, we worked up 60 machines, about half PCs and half Macs. Naturally, the PC process was more intensive, since they were integrated more tightly with our Windows network. Unbind the machine from the domain, migrate the user files to a local profile, unmanage Symantec Antivirus, uninstall Catlin applications. With the Macs, uninstalling was a simple matter of click and delete, and there was no domain to leave!

The best news is that we got through all of the machines in the two days' time that the seniors spent on Mt. Hood. We take pride in getting through large tasks such as this without breaking a sweat or working additional hours. It helped that we used some leftover salary funds to hire additional help -- thank you, Christopher!

Working on so many machines provides interesting insight into student use patterns. The machines varied widely in age and condition. Some the students had just purchased to replace dead units, whereas others lasted the full four years of high school. Some were terribly dented (but still running), and others were in nearly perfect condition. All students customized their desktops, but some went further, changing color schemes, installing a notification service, and plastering the cases with stickers. Some desktops were spotless, others cluttered with years' of files. Limewire showed up consistently, despite warnings about spyware infections. Some machines were running smoothly (even the oldest ones); others badly needed a reimage.

Simultaneously, we are accepting orders from families for laptops for the upcoming ninth grade class. Check out our laptop program page for specifications and process details. Two early observations are worthy of note. For the first time in the program, students are purchasing Macs more than PCs. The word is out that Macs are less troublesome to manage (though they more easily suffer physical damage), and the MacBook design gets bonus points for cool design right now. I have also been struck by the desire of most parents to upgrade some part of the machine -- RAM, hard drive size, or even color (witness the black MacBook). We are discouraging parents from buying the MacBook Pro because of the soft aluminum case, but some buy it anyway, and to be fair, some students are known to take excellent care of their machines.

This week, we return the laptops to the students and close up school. Seniors keep their network files for 30 days and their network accounts for a year. We also quietly announce the alumni web site, which we hope will soon grow into a hub of activity for alumni of all ages. The tech department is just gearing up for a busy summer of course, what with infrastructure, database, web, and deployment projects to complete. We are once again hiring two summer intern veterans for the summer and welcoming a parent volunteer or two at times. For me, it is terrific to finish up my first full year at the helm of the department and look forward to moving through the rhythm of the year a second time.

Catching up on my blogging, I came across the following interesting stories. Perhaps I will remember to use them in the future now that I have noted them here!

OER Commons: an open collection of quality, university-level lesson plans

Fully online courses in K-12 districts

Teens limit personal profile information -- helps broaden the discussion about youth online safety

E-portfolios: Making Things E-asy -- nice case study and overview of electronic portfolio technologies and implementation

Office and Windows for $3? -- Ndiyo blog pokes a hole through Microsoft's recent announcement. Why buy Office and Windows for $3 through your government when you can get Linux and OpenOffice for free?

Tons of free audio resources over at Open Culture, my new favorite blog

Google Maps releases My Maps, potentially useful to students and teachers

Bill releases DrupalEd -- I just need five minutes to give it a try.

Interwrite Pad -- another interactive pen alternative to Smart Boards and Tablet PCs

VMWare -- possible alternative to Parallels. I would love to hear more first-hand comparisons of the two products.

Exe -- learning content authoring tool

How to design effective action learning teams

This American Soundtrack

Best Online Documentaries

Chris Lehmann, principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia finds the time to keep up a rich blog while running the school. The blog is an integral part of his daily administrative life, reading like the notes to a school community that are usually kept internal to the school. Chris reflects on issues of school development, funding, and operation with honesty and urgency that reflects the importance of his undertaking in Philadelphia.

Last week, Chris posted a statement of concern about student self-segregation to the school's internal discussion forum. He received a flurry of replies from within the school and shared them anonymously on his public blog.

Every good school administrator strives to achieve this level of broad conversation within and beyond the school. In a wired world, this blog may represent the new form of reflection, transparency, and professional development essential to good administrator practice. On with it!

I had my first professional networking experiences in the Pacific Northwest. I drove up to Seattle for a planning meeting for the second annual TechShare conference. This June get-together speaks most directly to school technology departments and features a roundtable format for all breakout sessions so that everyone can participate. The planning group members are committed to the conference concept and have a good working relationship. I expect good things from this second iteration of TechShare.

Other than TechShare, I get the sense that professional networking among independent schools in Washington and Oregon is not so strong, perhaps because of the great distances among schools or the relatively small number of independent schools here compared to larger metro areas. For sure, the SF Bay Area has it going on with BAISNet, which through the thoughtful stewardship of Hoover Chan and others has grown into a lively, responsive community that interacts through email and occasional, impromptu meetings.

BAISNet serves many different types of technology staff. For those who run a one-person department in their schools, BAISNet is a lifeline to other tech professionals who are willing to answer the simplest questions within minutes. To more seasoned professionals, it is a great sounding board for new concepts and technical discussions. One of the reasons for the success of BAISNet is that face-to-face meetings build a level of familiarity and trust with others that add tremendous value to the electronic communications. Now if only BAISNet would build a richer online community!

I will do my part to strengthen professional networks here as much as I can. MACEP is the most active list I have found so far and a good starting point. Jim Heyderickx is a good partner-in-crime for this effort. I would hope that we could build stronger connections to public and parochial schools in the Portland area and build the supportive network that would benefit many!

My one box and I made the drive from Oakland to Portland yesterday, and today I had my first day at Catlin Gabel. I proudly carried my one box to the tech office, opened it, and ... discovered that it was the wrong box! Instead of my precious workplace knick knacks, I only had the detritus from my office at home -- an old telephone, a box of camera accessory packaging. I guess I really have succeeded in moving my work life into the virtual space, as about the only item I miss from the box is my "emergency sweater."

I received and set up my new MacBook Pro today. Yes, it is as easy as everyone has been saying to install Windows using Parallels. I was especially impressed with how easy it was to increase the RAM allocation to the Windows virtual machine. I would like to set up a second VM at some point to run Linux. I believe that we are going to build our new intranet on Linux instead of the Windows servers I have grown accustomed to using, so I will have to become more familiar with navigating a Linux environment. I might even use my laptop as a testing server for new software.

Learning about a different technology program is extremely invigorating. Altiris deployment software is my new best friend. With one click, I installed the client software on my computer. With a second click, my colleague Dave installed Office on my computer! The software can also remote control client computers -- very handy for quick support calls and how-to's from across campus. Mac-only campuses likely use Remote Desktop for this. If I understand correctly, Altiris is cross-platform. The software isn't cheap, but it provides tremendous value to tech departments.

I completed my last day at University High School today. All the belongings I needed to take with me took up only one small moving box. Everything else of value was either owned by the school or virtual. The greatest tangible assets I have are the scripts I learned to develop while at UHS.

Next week, I will present at NECC on school web intranets, and then I will join the Catlin Gabel faculty in Portland, Oregon.

While the servers burn, Guru and Eric have completely handled our off-site Summerbridge installation. Each summer, we invite one or two recently graduated seniors to work 100 hours for us, though every year our assistants generally work more than that. Without their assistance, it would be quite difficult to process all of the computers, printers, and network equipment that we turn over each summer. They have installed 15 laptops, six printers, and a Mac lab of 16 computers and a server in the past week. As Summerbridge begins its session tomorrow, they will likely provide a bunch of technical support as well.

I officially have one more month to work at University High School. I will spend the first week of July at NECC in San Diego, and then drive from Oakland to Portland to start my new job at Catlin Gabel on July 10. Ironically, the students participated in Closing Exercises today, during which they said goodbye to departing faculty members. Tomorrow, our faculty will do the same. Aren't I supposed to be finished before people say goodbye? Good thing I have more time, I guess, because there is a lot to do. The work always goes faster when school is closed.

I celebrated the end of the year by installing mySQL on the new web server. However, PHP couldn't load the mySQL extension correctly for some reason. I have a week to resolve problems like that and then get all of the services running. Then we will take down the old servers and launch the new ones. The new web server will be probably be live by June 12, but since school will be out of session, I will have the luxury of freezing the old web site and migrating all of the scripts and data over a couple of weeks' time. I hope to reserve the final week to unbind my user account from all of the mail notification and permissions settings it holds, then [set up a mail autoresponder to reply to mail messages for a few weeks. Eventually, I will completely disable the mailbox but keep the network account in order to provide scripting support next year when needed.

I have been giving more thought to my NECC presentation on culturally strategic development of a school intranet. The move to a different school helps, because I have to think carefully about what components of the UHS intranet will work well at Catlin Gabel, and which should be installed first. My first reaction is that CGS makes it a point to trust students with responsibility, so there likely will not be a negative reaction to unmoderated spaces such as discussion forums and photo galleries. My second thought is that a school that emphasizes its community spirit would probably want more community features on the home page, such as a random photo from the gallery. Then again, random photos may be too context-independent for an intranet home page.

Classes at UHS ended yesterday. Now the work of our department really heats up. In a similar manner to the construction crews on campus, we have just under three months to take everything apart, order and configure the new bits, and put it all back together again in time for the start of school. Of course, I will also hand the reins off to a new director partway through this race!

For some reason, it is a well-kept secret how much work we do during the summer. While most of the school takes its vacation, we take advantage of the departure of most of the users to upgrade facilities and perform routine maintenance on systems and servers. That way, we start the year with a configuration built to last and the ability to give our users the attention they need during the year. Schools that employ their tech staff on a school year schedule should consider extending them to year-round. The additional cost is most worth it!

Today, we removed just about every bit of computer equipment from the lower campus in anticipation of the start of construction next week. PC Lab, Mac Lab, physics classroom computers, arts classroom computers, office printers are all now upstairs in our staging area near our offices. Our students were helpful in transporting pieces up to the Library. Next year, the lower campus will have an elevator and ADA ramps, which will be so helpful!

We don't do a great job of keeping our documentation up to date. Now with me leaving and Cécile coming, it makes a lot of sense to document as much as possible of what we do, so that the transition is as smooth as possible. Though it may not be the conventional wisdom, we just don't have the time to produce such complete documentation the rest of the time, and -- more importantly -- keep it up to date!

Plone never caught on as a general-purpose tool at UHS, because the graphic template was too rigid, Zope/Python were too unfamiliar to us, and the Active Directory integration was incomplete in the free version (it doesn't support groups well enough). Plone is still perfect for internal, tech department documentation, and I still feel it is kind of like a wiki on steroids. When I finish building our new web server, I will install Plone and bind it to Active Directory, but I won't make it available to most of our school community.

Here is my tech documentation Plone folder so far. I have a long way to go, but I am just trying to add one important topic per day as issues in that area arise.