Accomplishments of the May 2006 Technology Bond

First a short post on what we have accomplished with our current bond funding. These dollars came available in May of 2006 and in the first summer we updated five student labs and also were able to give new laptops to our teachers. Planning then began for upgrading our classrooms with a full suite of multimedia tools. In the summer of 2007 we installed a sound amplification system, document camera, dvd/vcr, desktop computer, and data projector in each of our 178 classrooms. In addition we also updated five more student labs at our buildings. In the summer of 2008 our work was more behind the scenes as our department upgraded our district network switching, speeding up our connectivity tenfold in places and one hundred fold in others. During the 2008-2009 school year we continue to upgrade our back-end infrastructure. Ongoing work includes installing elementary wireless upgrades and migrating our server farm to a more resilient blade center format. All of this work provides a solid foundation upon which to build going forward. The work still ahead of us is to provide as much flexible student access to tech as possible within available physical spaces and remaining bond dollars.

Access to Tech in East Grand Rapids

Currently two areas of focus on how we'll provide access for our students. First for our younger students, we are working to increase the number of machines in the classroom and in our labs. We're investigating the use of Thin Client Computing and Open Source software to provide this access. We would leverage our robust network and the broad spectrum of software available in the Open Source community to make our remaining bond dollars go farther and provide more access for our younger elementary students. For our students in grades 4-5 and up, the future will be in individual student devices. I think it's a no-brainer that sometime in the future our students above a particular age will show up with their own connected devices. I can't yet tell you when this will be in place, but the prevalance of web-enabled mobile phones and the availability of sub $200 laptops will make this more and more possible. In the mean time we'll continue to support upper elementary and secondary with solid desktop labs and carts of laptops.