ASCS Technology Committee Meeting Minutes
4/21/2008
Attendees:
Kathy Thompson, Angela Bowman, Chris Ganus, Dam Lemcke, Pam Fox, Marie Pishko, Hank Caruso, Carol Mayo, Frank Banul, Steve Diller
I. Carol and Hank reported on Maypearl school visit to look at Thin Client solution in use.
- Appears to be a good, cost-effective set up.
- Set up has master computers with 3 slaves card attached and 2 cards per master.
- Students file servers should be independent from teachers'.
- Product literature from NComputing was distributed.
- Literature shows no USB connection on the clients. This is a problem for ASCS application. Carol to verify on 2nd visit to Maypearl.
II. Technology Plan Review
A. Goals/Objectives must be simply stated and measurable.
1. Goal 1: Professional Development - notes/comments
- SBEC is used by Region 10. We could also used ISTE.
- There is no diocesan standard set for teacher development.
- The diocesan standard for student skills was written in 2004. For now we must focus on getting teachers to the point at which they can teach to this standard.
- STaR Chart -
- Teacher self assessments completed.
- Focused on Educator Prep, Learning, and Leadership/Administration sections. Less focus on Infrastructure section.
- Hank and Marie are analyzing the STaR results.
- Looking into grouping teachers according to assessment and making corresponding plans for trainings to be held by an outside trainer.
- Need to define what a technologically competent teacher is and then set training plan.
- Suggested to use STaR as a baseline and measurement tool.
- Enterprise Licensing - Need to find out if this comes with educational credits? Pam to work with Angela to sort out.
- Mentor program should include substitutes for teachers to enable teachers to go out for training.
- Technology/curriculum integration, cross-curriculum pilot programs in process. Need write up of results including 3 positives, 3 negatives, and student feedback.
- Dan to generate letter for parish to solicit technology resources/talent from parishioners.
- Teachers to generate technology wish-lists to tie to parish resources.
- Need to include Safe Environment Cleared statement in letter.
2. Goal 2: Acquiring and Using Technology in ASCS
- Need to implement and enforce a Service Request Form policy to track service requests in order to justify support personnel.
- Inventory list -
- April 27, 3:00 - Dan, Angela, Chris, Mike, Frank, Pam to meet at school and review current inventory.
III. Next meeting: May 19.
- Please review Technology Plan draft and email goals/measurable objectives to Kathy.

thin comment

Well, for all you techies, I actually did read the article and the subsequent comments. They don't seem to support the claims of cost savings or relatively few problems. So, definitely something to consider. Celine has also been looking into leasing PC's as an option. More on this later.
Thanks to everyone who attended last night!
Kathy

NComputing Info

I was doing some searching on the internet and the nComputing website. Following is some info that is encouraging:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/NComputing-Spreads-IO-Wealth/

http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/2008/02/ncomputing_gree.html

In the above article/blog, they reference how the L230 has USB memory device support. This looks like a good solution that is used by many schools. I think the only important thing to understand with this is the Microsoft licensing requirements we would be held to.

Chris