The 3rd meeting of the Kennedy Technology Committee was held Thursday evening, October 14th. Only a few parents were able to attend.
Technology Tour. The SFCP (School Family Community Partnership) is planning a Technology Tour for Kennedy parents in the evening of November 15th, to inform parents of the technology used at Kennedy and how it supports the curriculum. The Kennedy representatives (Jessica Jozwiak & Lisa Trychta) contacted the Tech Committee to see if we could assist, or had ideas that would make the evening more informative or enjoyable. Pradnya Parulekar is on both the SFCP and the Tech Committee. She relayed that they expect perhaps 150 parents (without students), and that the plan is for Don to lead batches of parents through a tour.
We had earlier considered holding some sort of Tech Night (with a LAN party, or demonstrating some of the technology being used at Kennedy, or having speakers on internet safety or Spyware, etc.), but we weren't sure how many parents we might attract. Combining our ideas with the SFCP Tech Tour evening seems like an effective way to accomplish both groups purposes.
Suggestions for involvement with the Tech Tour were; to have a demonstration of the redesigned Kennedy web site, to show how Webquest students work on team webpages, to have a station for explaining Talk203 and signing up touring parents, to have someone demonstrating the ability to download a video clip and display it in a classroom, and to demonstrate the Kennedy radio station (perhaps with some live broadcast from the tour group, or at least with a radio available to hear what the station is broadcasting during the tour). We need more information on how we might help with the video clip demonstration idea, and the radio station idea, and Wayne Lindquist and Kavian Goharderakhshan will follow up these ideas, respectively.
Kennedy Website. The Kennedy website continues to be upgraded: Debbie has redesigned the Sports and Intramurals web pages with this year's schedules. The calendar was updated with 3 months of information in September, and the plan is to upload an updated version, every month. One team newsletter (the Panthers) has been uploaded, but we need to find out who all the new newsletter editors are, to start coordinating with them. Kavian is going to follow up on this. The district is holding a Communications Workshop October 26th on design for newsletter editors, and this may be an opportunity to start coordinating getting electronic copies for the websites, along with being sent to the printers.
The master copy of the site being kept on Paulette Goodman's computer had gotten out of sync with the server, so a new, current copy was retrieved by downloading the complete site from the server. This highlighted the awkwardness and bottleneck problem with the current system. The first try to download the site took just under 3 hours, and had to be redone, since CuteFTP converted some of the filenames from lowercase to uppercase. The second download succeeded, but took approximately 5 hours! The complete site is ~77 MB, so that's a transfer rate of only 41.7 kbps! Slower than a dial-up modem!
(After the Tech Committee meeting, the district has decided on a vendor for redesigning the district website. Among other things, the plans call for a design with each group having access and being responsible for their own area. Hopefully, this should alleviate a lot of the bottleneck problem.)
Webquest. We will be starting Webquest, again. The first meeting will be Tuesday, October 19th, after school, then we will revert to Thursdays. Copies of the downloaded copy of the current site are being made on CD for the students to use as starting point. The plan is for the students to get an initial copy of the pages the students will be working with as a starting point from these CD's. To introduce them all to working with them in FrontPage, Darlene Ruther has agreed to walk them through importing the pages, and creating a webpage of their own, to make sure they are all able to do the common things in FrontPage: use the features correctly (relative vs. absolute reference, etc.), and to find the options they want readily (adjust font size, control background, use tooltips, etc). Then the plan is for them to begin by checking their team sites for deficiencies and outdated information, and also to divide up the other webpages which still need to be redesigned or updated (Health, Foreign Language, Eagle Express, LRC, etc.) between the teams, to determine what needs updating on those sites.
We will need some additional volunteers to help oversee Webquest.
Return to Tech Committee page, reload KJHS home page, or NCUSD 203 web site.