The tech team trio of myself, Dean Schuler and Joe Willis met last Thurs­day on the heels of a dis­trict wide tech meet­ing held that same day. The three of us dis­cussed a ver­i­ta­ble cor­nu­copia of top­ics regard­ing the state of tech­nol­ogy  in the dis­trict. There were really two main top­ics that dom­i­nated the dia­logue at the meet­ing as they have in the forums; those were the use­ful­ness of the inter­net fil­ter­ing sys­tem, and the re-purposing of older lap­tops into mobile labs for stu­dent use. As far as the inter­net fil­ter goes, the three of use dis­cussed a num­ber of options that would make the sys­tem more use­ful for stu­dents and teach­ers, decid­ing that per­haps the best course of action to take is to assign user accounts to all of the edu­ca­tors in the build­ing. I per­son­ally dis­cussed this idea with our super­in­ten­dent, who was not opposed to the idea. He then requested that I attempt to gather more infor­ma­tion from other dis­tricts who are oper­at­ing under sim­i­lar circumstances.

The other topic that the three of us dis­cussed at length was the use of com­puter labs and clus­ters in the build­ing. This con­ver­sa­tion was wide reach­ing and exam­ined many dif­fer­ent issues. I was the con­sen­sus of the group that the small clus­ters of com­put­ers located in class­rooms are widely under­used and that a bet­ter use of resources would be for the dis­trict to focus on mov­ing in the direc­tion of mobile com­put­ers and an enhanced wire­less network.