District Administration - September 2010 - (Page 61)

TECHNOLOGY and go to school The computing giants compete to provide powerful online applications to school districts—for free. By AlAn Dessoff U ntil this yeAr, the oregon Department of education was running a central portal of thousands of learning resources that required all teachers and students in the state to have an e-mail address as authentication for security purposes. Because many districts didn’t offer student e-mail, however, the learning materials were not available to everyone. steve nelson, chief it strategist for the department, needed a new e-mail service that would provide security and privacy to users, enable compliance with federal regulators, and integrate with course management and learning management systems. nelson found what he was looking for with Google Apps education edition. www.DistrictAdministration.com “other solutions were less secure, mature and reliable,” he explains. “nothing compared with Google’s complete suite.” in April, oregon became the first state to offer the Google Apps education edition to all its public schools when it signed an agreement with the company to make the tools available to any district in the state that requested a Google domain. of the 221 oregon districts, 68 signed up within the first two months. “We’ll continue to add more. it’s a combination of cost avoidance and increased functionality. We can’t build what Google can,” says nelson. Kentucky Chooses Microsoft Meanwhile, the Kentucky Department of education wanted an improved capability to provide e-mail services to the more than 700,000 students, teachers and staff in the state’s 174 districts. school users in the state were asking for more e-mail storage, as well as Web 2.0 technologies, and the department needed a way to integrate its active directory infrastructure with its hosted e-mail offering. Chuck Austin, who spearheaded the search for vendors in the department’s office of education technology, selected Microsoft’s live@edu, and the state agency rolled it out over one May weekend. it was one of the largest and quickest deployments of the product, and the “largest and fastest cloud computing implementation of all time,” according to Microsoft. its features were “far greater than anything we could have afforded to offer to every school in Kentucky,” says terry holliday, Kentucky’s state commissioner of education. September 2010 61 http://www.DistrictAdministration.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - September 2010

District Administration - September 2010
Contents
From the Editor
News Update
Inside the Law
Conversations
District Profile
Administrator Profile
A Salary Recession for School Administrators?
Working Hard in the Big Easy
School Safety Gets the Ax
Keeping Schools Safe during Challenging times
Google and Microsoft Go to School
A Bull Market for Financial Literacy
Problem/ Solution
Tech Disruptions
Student Counsel
Product Focus
New Products
Superintendent’s Insights

District Administration - September 2010