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4/17/2009

Channel 30 at Easterby and Virus Cleanup

Clean up on the virus continued in the early hours of this morning - staff were operating on 3-4 hours of sleep, but they somehow looked alert (must have been the coffee).

We had a scheduled visit by Channel 30 to Patrick Marino's classroom at Easterby to see how he utilizes the technology in his classroom. See the video here. Patrick utilizes the 16 HP netbooks to increase learning and student engagement. The class is a wonderful example of 21st century learning.

Posted at 7:54 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/16/2009

Virus Attack

One of the biggest virus attacks in recent history started sometime Wednesday night. It was a trojan that inserted itself into the Windows Share folder and proceeded to ping addresses at a volume that people were not able to log in or connect to the internet. Fortunately, it wasn't the kind of virus that destroys hard drive information.

What started out as a few calls here and there, began to increase and by late this afternoon, we realized we were under serious attack. Eric and his team went to work and started locking down the ports that the virus was using on the network to spread. This seemed to contain the virus - the worst outbreak for some reason was at Fresno High. Art will have his folks out early in the morning to tackle the PCs there one by one.

We were grateful that our push to join PC to the Fresno Unified Domain had been successful with over 13,000 of our PCs. We had been able to push Forefront antivirus software out to those PCs over the past few months - and most of them were impervious to the attack (a few PCs were unable to update their virus database). But that still left a number of PCs that were vulnerable - by locking down the ports, we were able to contain the virus until we protected many of the rest of the PCs. Once all of our PCs are joined to the domain, with antivirus updates pushed out every three hours, the threat from this type of attack will be greatly reduced.

Posted at 11:43 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Video Conferencing, email and text message retention

This morning we held a video conference with the College Board staff and a number of folks in the conference room. The College Board has a polycom system - we have a Cisco Telepresence system - the two don't talk (of course). So we ended up using client software that works with Polycom. It reduced our access down to ISDN speeds - basically dial-up speeds. Yuck. At the same time, we were in the beginning of a large virus attack on the district and the PC we grabbed to run the video conference client software had been laying around and didn't have the latest antivirus software update - and you guessed it - started getting infected during the video conference. Not a great start for the day for technology

Later, we met with our district attorneys to discuss the retention requirements for email (which we're pretty clear about) and text messaging and IM (which we were less clear about) and student photo release. It was a good session and it looks like we will have something that we can add into the AUP and take to the Board soon. A number of districts consider email, text messaging and IM to be "transitory" - and that the responsibility of whether email should be kept (because it's the public's business) should be kept on the originator or receiver of the information - they way it was before email was invented. They've got a point - just because we can automate something, doesn't mean that the IT department or our attorneys should take over the decision making process about whether an email is district business or person or a draft or a note, etc.

Posted at 4:29 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/15/2009

Classroom Printer, TAC, and Board Tech Presentation

Met with HP today to zero in on a proposed classroom printer. We've been working on this for months, including classroom trials and are coming close to making a decision. It's a color laser (huge cost savings over inkjets) and scans and copies. It will work with the new assessment software we've been working with.

We also had our monthly Technology Advisory Committee - it's a great group that has really given us some great advice on many decisions. Today we reviewed the recent IT Survey and will send it out based on recommendations from the group. We also reviewed the AUP and made a number of changes that will need to go before the Board.

Finally, we had a big presentation to the Board tonight on technology in the district. It went well - and gave the opportunity to present an overview of the student information system we're proposing to co-develop with Microsoft.

Posted at 10:16 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/14/2009

Solver

Jim Lacenski, from Solver came in today to help us put together the beginning structures of a district dashboard using Microsoft's Performance Point software that works with Sharepoint. We're focusing on just two elements, suspensions and attendance. The goal is to have a small dashboard for those two components by Friday and see how it works to drill in and look around at the data from different viewpoints.

A dashboard has the potential of driving huge changes in a large system like ours - we have high hopes that these efforts will pay of for years into the future.

Posted at 4:05 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/9/2009

Cell Phone Outage

Spending a few days over in Santa Cruz during Spring Break when I noticed that there was no access on my iPhone. And then I noticed that my Verizon wireless card that connects my laptop to the Internet (and the world) wasn't connecting. Turned out some vandals had crawled 8 ft down a manhole in the Bay Area and cut 5 major fiber optic lines. Wiped out most of the south Bay area including San Jose and all of Santa Cruz County.

I have to admit it was bizarre to drive around with no cell phone access - and no ability to pull up the Internet on my laptop. Two co-authors of a book on Netbooks due out this October had contacted me to do an interview for the book at 9am this morning. By 8:30am, I realized I better find something, so I hopped in the car with cellphone and laptop looking for a connection. Finally found a weak signal on a hill in front of a closed Mortgage Company (no surprise). But the signal only held on long enought to tell the authors that it may not last - which it didn't. I lost the signal and couldn't get it back. Only tonight, around 8pm did Verizon come back (AT&T was back up around 6pm).

It was amazing how dependent I've become on cell connections. A little spooky when they are gone - sort of an "end of the world" feeling.

Posted at 9:45 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/8/2009

Network World

Interviewed by a reporter from Network World regarding netbooks (we were an early adopter of them, both the ASUS eeePC and the HP MiniNote). Network World is doing an article on the phenomenon of netbooks - their popularity has surprised a lot of people.

In education, we've been after a small-footprint laptop that will share the students' desk with textbooks and paper for a couple of years now. We've now deployed 10,000 HP MiniNotes to our over 50 of our 106 schools on a 2 students per 1 laptop ratio. Teachers and students have integrated the laptops into daily curriculum with great creativity and innovation.

Posted at 5:24 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/3/2009

CTE, Programmer III Job Interviews

This morning started early with a meeting of the Fresno RJI Infrastructure Committee - this meeting was focused on water issues facing our valley (the current draught appears to be man-made - interesting challenges ahead).

Met with the Superintendent's Career Tech Ed Commission headed up by Tracewell Hanrahan. An increased push for project-based learning will have a big impact - and make school more relevant to thousands of our students.

Finally, we did second round interviews for the Programmer III position for the Lawson project.

Posted at 5:18 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/2/2009

Ewing Elementary and Art Hop

I met with Stephanie Collom, Ewing Elementary Principal and several of her Digital Portfolio & Classroom Laptop teachers today. They are doing some great things with the laptops - and their students are engaged. There were a few speed bumps they had run into, but we worked through them. We also talked about the MySites and future directions in Technology.

I dragged Vincent Harris with me to the downtown Art Hop (first Thursday of the month). It was a beautiful evening and the galleries in downtown were "hopping" with people. We talked about having our art students take a field trip to Art Hop (we're sure that's already happening - we saw a lot of students).

Posted at 9:44 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/1/2009

Synch 9 from Smartboard

I started off the morning meeting with a dedicated teacher who was concerned about the aging computers in her classroom and where could they find the funds to upgrade them.

Later in the morning we had a demo by Smartboard and IVS of the Synch 9 product (formerly Synchroneyes before Smart Tech purchase the company). It was very friendly and it was obvious how it could aid classroom management in computer labs and in classrooms where there are a lot of laptops. The teacher can push any screen out to all students, block the internet, see any screen that any of the students are looking at - and many other features. We're looking at the possibility of doing a pilot with the software and some of our classrooms.

Posted at 3:18 PM by Kurt Madden | Category: Almost Daily | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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