Your recommendations hit home for me. In the last bond, my predecessor had the wisdom and opportunity to partner with the local cable company to build out a fiber network to all schools and to link a 100Mbps Internet connection. When I took over, we added pervasive wireless in all campuses and built 2 virtual networks… one for district devices and one with no security settings to enable personally-owned devices to connect. Kids now routinely bring their own technology, most often the iPod touch. We moved the filter to an in-line position so no proxy settings would need to be configured. And we synched the filter’s user database with Active Directory enabling all teachers to use their PC login credentials to override the filter if they need to.

After the deployment of PODNet (personally owned devices network) with it’s fully open, no configuration access, the ASUS EeePC rolled onto the market. We were positioned to instantly implement it and now have over 900 in the district… my department has only purchased 200 of them. The rest have come from school budgets, PTO fund-raising and grants. Our student access went up 32% with no new budget allocation. And since the EeePC (like other netbooks) is almost a zero-support device, we made no staffing changes for support either.

Our direction now is to marry the netbook with a subject area… namely writing. In a pilot project with 5 elementary schools, we implemented classroom sets of EeePC netbooks in support of a Writer’s Workshop initiative happening at the schools. The 5th grades are reporting better interest, better quantity and better writing (especially among boys who traditionally lag) than our participating teachers have ever seen. Our assessment data will come this spring.

Anyway, I can’t help but feel a sincere appreciation for your message and assert that it can be done. We have rolled out Fileway for web access to network server storage over the web at a the tiniest of cost (we said no thanks to Microsoft Sharepoint) and have a Google education domain. We have no choice but to do these things inexpensively and in a secured environment.

You might like to see some of our publications on the efforts underway in LPS:

http://yourit.littletonpublicschools.net

This is our tech guidelines for schools. As a site-based decision-making district, our Principals have considerable control over spending and it is important to get them all on the same page. After last year’s release of YourIT, we went from 1 school with document cameras to 14 and 12 have them in every single classroom… all the same model, and the same training support… again without a new allocation of funds to my department.

I also keep a blog which I linked to this post where I have tried to chronicle what we are up to. It is certainly nothing like yours, but it has been an important communication portal for us.

Thank you for your post as it both validates some of our work and has added some more things for me to think about.

-Dan Maas, CIO Littleton Public Schools