The Tech Committee met in the form of several individual meetings, and an evening meeting on November 11th, 2004. Altogether participation included: Don Perry, Wally Loague, Paul Shipman, Ernie Chamot, Wayne Lindquist, Pradnya Parulekar, and Debbie Houston.

Technology Tour. We firmed up plans for our participation in the Kennedy Technology Tour, cosponsored with the SFCP (School Family Community Partnership), scheduled for Monday evening, November 15th, at 7:00 PM. Ernie, Wayne, and Pradnya had met with Lisa Trychta and Jessica Jozwiak October 10th about the schedule for the tour; Wayne had exchanged emails with Paul Shipman (teacher representative on SFCP) and Vicki Ross (Technical Information Specialist) about helping demonstrate video clip and wireless networking; and Kavian Goharderakhshan checked with Don on the practicality of demonstrating the radio station.

The schedule of the tour will depend on the number of parents showing up. Our expectation is that Don can guide a tour of 20 to perhaps 30 parents. More than that will have to be split into 2 or more groups, with one group being shown things at one station or another, while Don shows the other group around, then picks up the first group to show them around. Accordingly, the plan is for the tour to include a couple stops, in addition to having refreshments:

1. The Tech Lab, where Brent Davis will be available to explain the various stations. There will also be the opportunity for interested parents to have a hands-on opportunity after the tour is over, or as a waiting station.
2. A classroom (room 101), where Wayne will help Paul demonstrate how technology is integrated with instruction, including video clips, the Elmo projection system, and several laptops set up to show typical student use of technology, with the opportunity for parents to try a Web Quest, "Inspiration" activities, and intranet capabilities. Paul and Wayne will meet to set up the classroom between 6:00 and 6:30, with Vicki's help, if necessary. Mrs. Kulik and Mrs. Donatelli may help over the course of the evening.
3. The Computer Lab in the LRC, where Ernie will show the redesigned Kennedy website (and contrast it with the old version), and Debbie or Kavian will be available to explain Talk203 and help any parents not yet signed up for it, to sign up. There could also be the opportunity for parents to return after the tour is over to sign up for Talk203, and to try creating a webpage with Frontpage, as the students are doing in Webquest.
4. We expect Don to also include the radio station, a science lab, and other stops in the tour, but don't plan anything extra for those portions.

As a contingency plan, Don will train a few others, probably Paul and Vicki, to lead the tour along with him, if there are too many parents to handle with a few stops. Pradnya said the responses so far are for ~25-30 attending.

District Website Redesign. The district has selected American Eagle, Inc. to contract overhauling/redesigning the District 203 website. Tracy Oliver (Manager of Data Operations) has organized a steering committee of staff and community involvement group representatives, to work with the contractors. Ernie is representing us on this committee, and distributed Focus Group Questionnaires from Tracy, to guide the website development to best meet all of our needs. Copies were distributed for Don, Wally Loague, and Mike Klick to provide feedback from the perspective of school administrators; to 3 teachers to provide feedback on teachers' areas of the website, and to our Tech Committee members (and for Pradnya to pass on to SFCP) to provide feedback on "community involvement groups."

In answering the Target Audience questions, it may help to consider the target audiences identified in the appendix of the report the District 203 Website Redesign Subcommittee made to the school board last spring. (The full report of the subcommittee is available as a 1.1 MB file)

KJHS Website Improvements. The Kennedy website has been further improved. Debbie Deacy reworked all the main pages to streamline maintenance by using "includes", so that the menu labels can be updated in one place, instead of in a dozen different files. Wally provided a Student Handbook page, and a Discipline Rules page which have been added to the site. The Calendar has been updated through December, and will be extended to cover the rest of the year at the next update.

Kavian has collected a list of this year's Team Newsletter editors, and they are being contacted to start arranging for getting pdf versions of the newsletters dumped regularly to the website. The Heroes, Panthers, and Crazy 8's newsletters have already been updated through November. Detailed instructions have been prepared for Darlene Ruther (Computer Support Associate at Kennedy) to upload the newsletters to the proper place.

Access to update the website continues to be a problem. The FTP password was changed without informing the school's Computer Support Associate, webpages can still only be uploaded from the one approved computer at Kennedy (meaning we have to come in to Kennedy during business hours to upload changes), and the one who made the changes to be uploaded can no longer do the uploading under the CSA's supervision: only Darlene can upload the files. So an additional step of instructing Darlene what goes where is also required. That multistep process (including testing of the uploaded changes to make sure they work correctly), means installing the above mentioned streamlining changes required a total of 5 trips in to Kennedy and 9.5 person hours between Debbie, Ernie, and Darlene. Transferring files via CuteFTP is also limiting. The current website is 77 MB, and downloading it earlier this year to have an accurate copy of what is currently on the server, took an average of just over an hour per 10 megabyte, in part because CuteFTP does it a single file at a time. This corresponded to an average transfer rate of 41.7 kbps, which is less than a dial-up connection via a 56 kbps modem!

Ralph Chapman has come up with a method to produce teacher and staff email addresses on the fly in a web page, protecting them from being harvested by spammers. He has written some Perl scripts that can search for a teacher by name or team in a text file, and then construct a webpage with email addresses that can be clicked on, to automatically start an email to the teacher via JavaScript. Wally has dumped a contact list of teacher email addresses to a text file for this use, and Ralph's page is being incorporated into the standard Kennedy webpage design.

Webquest. There have been 3 meetings of Webquest now, with all teams represented and 24 students participating. Meetings will be after school on Thursdays (although 2 of the first 3 were shifted because of conflicts.) Darlene introduced the students to FrontPage at the first meeting. At the second meeting, we assigned some of the other pages (clubs, sports, health, etc.) that hadn't been updated, to be adopted by some of the teams. At the third meeting, we provided a footer to implement the requirement that each page display when it was last updated, and have a link back to the main team page (if it is a page within a team's website), and/or a link back to the Kennedy main page.

Future Activities. Debbie Houston suggested that some of the technology to be displayed in the Tech Tour for parents, would appeal to the students as the technology itself. In particular, Kennedy might consider starting a student radio club, or a video club for the students to use the video editing abilities to make their own videos.

The next Technology Committee meeting

Since the evening attendance has dropped so low, and since the school staff is really only available to participate in the mornings before school, the next meeting has tentatively been changed to a morning time:

1. Assist Paul Shipman in video, Elmo, and laptop setup for Tech Tour - Wayne
2. Demo Kennedy Website and sign up parents for Talk203 for Tech Tour - Ernie, Debbie Houston, Kavian
3. Lead tour - Don
4. Collect Focus Questionnaires and represent school's interests in District Web Redesign Steering Committee - Ernie
5. Distribute Questionnaires to SFCP - Pradnya
6. Incorporate teacher email search into standard design Kennedy webpage - Ralph, Debbie Deacy
7. Relay to Darlene that the next calendar update is to be for the full year - Wally

Return to Tech Committee page, reload KJHS home page, or NCUSD 203 web site.