EdTech Avenue

For a little while, anyway…

Now that I’m really on the home stretch, work is slightly more stressful than it was before Christmas break. I’m working very hard getting things done that I want settled before I start my leave in what I hope will be a few weeks yet. This week I started updating our mobile lab, which is quite a task when there really is nowhere to set them all up at one time attached to power. I have a few set up in my office and a few out on the top of the cart which is sitting in the hallway for lack of any other place for it! These laptops are pretty slow; they are Pentium III 650 machines with 256 MB RAM running Windows XP. I’ve been working with half of them on a wired 100MB network and the other half on their wireless 54MB cards. Windows updates haven’t been run for quite some time, so there are many!

We’ve also begun our 2nd Learnia test for the year. Since we are only giving one ClassLinks test, I wanted to make sure there was a similar ratio of standards covered as are on the ClassViews tests. That was no small feat for math since of the six from which to choose, none include all the standards. Reading was a bit easier; I was able to find at least one ClassLinks with similar standards to the ClassViews. I ended up building my own tests for math to include as close to the same standards as I could find. I had some trouble with matching up the standards with the actual items available to add to the tests, but I worked around it. We’ll see how it works out!

And then there’s the E-Rate process… We did not receive as many bids as I expected from our Form 470 posting. But now I think that is probably a good thing. With our budget the way it is for next year, I think we’ll hold off on the bigger projects and just apply for discounts on services we already have in place.