Get Connected - April 2008 - (Page 1)

Get Connected April 2008 | The ENA Network Community Journal The End of a Bottleneck Orange County Public Schools Celebrate Improved Connectivity and Enhanced Educational Opportunities In October of 2007, Florida’s Orange County (Orlando) Public Schools (OCPS) completed its new, district-wide, high-speed Internet connectivity solution, known as the Managed Broadband Internet Access (MBIA) project. The project’s objective was to completely upgrade the district’s wide area network to provide a minimum of 10 Mbps of connectivity to each school and over 900 Mbps connectivity for the district as a whole to the Internet and research and education networks such as Internet2 and National LambdaRail (NLR). The project’s vision was lead by the OCPS Information, Communications and Technology Services (ICTS) Department under the direction of Roland Moore, CIO, Hermes Mendez, director of Infrastructure, and Myron Bryant, assistant director of Network Services. Their challenge was to increase productivity and enhance teaching and learning throughout OCPS schools by creating a highly scaleable network that is not only capable of securely supporting data, voice and video on a single network but also able to meet the growing needs of a diverse and rapidly expanding student population that numbered 176,236 as of last quarter 2007. “The long-term goal,” explains Mendez, “is to provide a robust, reliable and monitored network that we can easily expand as our needs and requirements increase. We also want to provide a network that will allow us to centralize services at the district office in order to alleviate some of the technology administrative needs at the sites.” ENA started the transition of over 220 OCPS sites in April of 2007 and successfully completed the project in October 2007. ENA worked closely with OCPS ICTS to create a solution that is uniquely designed to deliver increased service capacity for OCPS’ schools, as well as provide scalability and flexibility to meet current and future technology and network requirements. The new high-speed network will accomplish all of the district’s needs with an Internet service capacity capable of scaling to 10 gigabits of connectivity and beyond. According to George Perreault, director of Instructional Technology & Library Media Services for OCPS, the investment has already more than paid off in the classroom. Today, students and teachers are enjoying vastly increased Internet capacity and thus benefiting from important classroom applications and rich online resources that previously were unavailable to them due to insufficient online access. “In partnership with ENA, the Managed Broadband Internet Access project has enabled significantly increased access to Web-based resources and applications for Continued on page 10 Hi-tech Indiana Library Thinks Outside the Box 4

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Get Connected - April 2008

The End of a Bottleneck: OCPS’ New Network Contents A Letter From the President Not Your Average Library: New Carlisle, IN New Consortium Program Launches May 1 Hands-on Education Education Leaders Decry EETT Cuts Much More Than E-mail: Gaggle’s Other Apps Notes From the CTO

Get Connected - April 2008

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