District Administration - October 2010 - (Page 66)

Making Your Schools and of SFL+a Architects in Raleigh, N.C. e main challenge, he says, is to provide enough outlets so students can recharge their laptops. But with PDAs, iPhones, and some laptops with batteries that last up to 10 hours, “technology can get to the point where we won’t even need all those outlets, because students can plug in when they get home,” Ferris says. Ted Finch, a technology analyst with FutureProof, a sustainability consulting ﬁrm, points out that, increasingly, many students are using their own laptops at school, rather than desktop PCs in the school building. “To future-proof schools to cope with this trend, it is becoming less important to wire classrooms for Ethernet and more important to set up a strong wireless network across the campus” to accommodate the increasing number of laptops, he says. To future-proof such a wireless network, he adds, “assume one laptop per child, in every classroom, library, common space in the school, then ensure that the wireless network can handle that many laptops at once, and with enough bandwidth for every student to access stream- FUTURE PROOF reduce costs now and in the future, and require little change in infrastructure. Kinlaw says the new school is projected to use about 50 percent less energy than another elementary school in the district, producing annual savings of $60,000 while also serving as an environmental teaching tool for other schools and their students. “If ing media concurrently, all with a strong signal throughout the school and possibly extending outdoors in some areas.” But some districts, like the Cumberland County (N.C.) Schools, are still using wires. “Everything is still hard-wired,” reports Tim Kinlaw, associate superintendent of the district. Accordingly, classroom “We can easily upgrade to new products and won’t have to go out and buy a whole new package.” —Tracy Tishion, K12 technology resources specialist, the Brookﬁeld (Conn.) Public Schools plugs for students’ laptops are part of a new sustainable building design prototype for K12 facilities that Ferris at FirstFloor K-12 Solutions has introduced in the New Century International Elementary School, which opened this fall. Even with its wiring, other features of the building, including a ground-source geothermal system that provides cooling and heating, and solar photovoltaic power systems with windows designed to maximize light from the outside, promise to signiﬁcantly you really want to future-proof a school, you have to design it to the greatest extent possible to impact student performance and reduce energy consumption in a big way,” says Ferris. e New Century school uses “a sustainable, state-of-the-art and cost-eﬀective” design, he says. Communications/Alerts Other technologies are helping districts improve infrastructure eﬃciencies and reduce costs in functions like communication and alerts. e Northeast Metro 916 (Minn.) Intermediate School District has adopted Honeywell Instant Alert, a Webbased emergency notiﬁcation system, to quickly notify parents and staﬀ members of situations ranging from school bus accidents to school closings because of weather. Instead of using telephone calling trees, the district reaches its audiences with voice, text and e-mail messages delivered through telephones, cell phones, PDAs, pagers, computers and fax machines. Faced with a tight operating budget, school administrators also use a ﬁle attachment feature to deliver nonemergency information to parents, such as reminders of meetings, that previously were mailed or delivered by students. “We used to send out a ursday folder with lots of papers that students would take home in their backpacks,” says Kristine Carr, the Northeast Metro district’s director of administraDistrict Administration e eBeam Edge from Luidia, on the far left side of the photo, aﬃxes to any whiteboard, wall or ﬂat surface to make that surface interactive, and is designed to be easily upgraded when needed, oﬀering more futur 66 October 2010

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

District Administration - October 2010
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
Curriculum Update
Facilities Update
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Conversations
The Price of a Good Education
Dividing Arizona
Making Your School Future-Proof
Connecting Curriculum with Community
A Small District’s Big Innovator
New Books
New Products
Product Focus
Tech Disruptions
Superintendent’s Insights
Online Edge
Professional Opinion

District Administration - October 2010