Meeting+Minutes+March+21,+2012

** Wednesday March 21, 2012 ** Members present: Kent Sauls, Gwendolyn Wallace, Mike Mahoney, Jentry Byleveld, Jill Schrader, Mike Schreiber, Kevin Keena, Kyle Tammen, Barb Bolen, Heidi Dudley, Diane Frank We started off the meeting by having the committee go to an Infinite Campus test site to see how some of the new features for Infinite Campus will work. We presented two teacher tools; the Teacher Newsletter and the Teacher Messenger. The Teacher Newsletter is helpful for notices and possibly publishing a class syllabus. The student must go and find the newsletter in their schedule area of Infinite Campus where it is listed as a hyperlink and once clicked on, displays as a PDF document. There is a very limited WSIWYG editor within the newsletter. Copy and paste does not work well within it, so there is a free html editor called Pagebreeze [|http://www.pagebreeze.com] that can be used if you want your newsletter have a more designed look. See the handout for more information. We have it saved in Teacher Folder (O:)>HHS>HHS-Technology>Directions, Tips. The Teacher Messenger is helpful for publishing notices that the student and parent should see in their portal account window and a message is also sent to the email address listed on the account. The crucial thing that Teacher Messenger needs in order to work is the teacher checkbox. The teacher checkbox needs to be checked under the preferences in the parent’s portal account. This is another reason why we need parents to have their own portal accounts. We have been encouraging all parents to get their own account, and we are going to do a big push on this in the fall. As teachers, if you know you want to use the Teacher Messenger feature, on Back to School Night, you need to stress to parents that they check preferences in their portal accounts and make sure the teacher checkbox is checked so that they can receive messages from you. Teacher Messenger can also send out pre-filled messages to all students on failing grades or missing assignments. Teacher Messenger is found in Infinite Campus under Instruction>Messenger.
 * HHS Technology Committee Meeting Minutes **
 * 1) **** Updates to Infinite Campus Gradebook (update will happen over spring break) **

Active Directory password changes will be going away. What that means is that the network password that you have now, could be the one you keep. You will no longer be prompted to change your password once a year (if you don’t want to have your current password forever, you could change it now, or you could do it anytime by going to control>alt>delete and change password). Whenever you do change it, you’ll need to let either Heidi or Diane know, so we can change it on our password records.
 * 2) **** Information about Active Directory password changes **

After conferring, Heidi and Stacey have come up with a plan for tech purchases for next year. All Language Arts classrooms, the Community room and room 110 in Special Ed, are all getting new machines. This will make all classroom computers Windows 7 computers. 10 rooms have older projectors. We are approved to buy 3 projectors. The three projectors that will be replaced are in 311, 113, and the choir room. Some money for projectors will be set aside to be used for bulb replacement or projector replacement as projectors break down. We will buy 3-4 bulbs for the Epson 82 model which is the model used in most of the classrooms. Science, Social Studies, the Library and the Main office are getting new printers. 5 classrooms have gray (old) speakers. We have checked which rooms have old speakers and we will replace those with the Logitech type speakers that are in other rooms. Smartboards will be installed in the small library lab, the community room, the admin conference room, and the personal survival room. We are getting 36 new computers in the big lab, so the computers in the large lab will go to the small lab, and the current small lab computers will be dispersed to the library floor. The configuration of the small lab will change for next year. The seating will change and we are working to get the wiring ready for this change. Once it is done, it should be a much better configuration and will allow for all of the students to have a clear view of the Smartboard. Smartboards cost 1069.00 New projectors cost 474.00 for the Epson 93 (if departments want to buy projectors from their budgets). If departments need to spend money, they could get some projectors. If they need document cameras the model is the F30 and they are 337.00. Netbooks run about 300.00 (if you need pricing on anything let Heidi know and she can get those prices for you).
 * 3) **** Information on current year purchases and next year tech purchases **

Every student server in the district will be going away in 3 years. The district will not replace these servers. Kids are saving bigger files than ever before and we can’t keep up with the demand for space. We need to encourage kids to save within their Google accounts as much as possible. Student shared folders like publications and yearbook, will still be there, but individual accounts will go away. Our message to students needs to be “Save in Google!!! Get your stuff moved out of your user folder and into your Google folder!!!” Eventually kids will have a generic log-in (hhs-student eagle) and they won’t be able to save within that log-in, they will have to save within Google or to a USB flash drive. Programs like Microtype that save individual user files will no longer work with a generic login. We need to find other alternatives. Business needs to be finding something that will replace Microtype because of the way it saves student files. More web-based program alternatives may be what we need to go to.
 * 4) **** Student logins and User Folders- how do we prepare for them going away? **

In our registration materials that are sent out every year for Heritage, there is a section each parent must fill out for Permissions. The district has always had us include a line to be initialed that says “I do not want my student to use the Internet-connected computers at school” We get lots of parents initialing everything on the sheet without reading it and then the student gets their account turned off. They can no longer log-in, get to any shared folders, and their Google account is disabled. This will no longer be on the form. If the parent does not want their student to have internet access they will have to come into school and fill out the appropriate paperwork. This is something that we have had to deal with each year, turning off student accounts, and then getting kids to have their parents re-sign the paperwork so they can get the account turned back on. It has been a big hassle and we are happy that it is going away.
 * 5) **** Student Internet Access Permissions- changes for next year **

The .__org__ EMAIL (only) for teachers is going away. This is the email portion of the .org side of Google that is the “for students” type of Google Apps. (Remember Heidi and Diane’s costumes for Halloween; we were illustrating this. Heidi was .org, the student/teacher type of Google account and Diane was .us, the mail or staff type of Google account). So if you have used the email portion of your .org account with your students you have until the end of the year and then the .org email for teachers will not work anymore. You will still be able to work within your .org account (which is where student accounts are) but you will not be able to email through it anymore (you’ll only use your .us, which is what we all use as the district email).
 * 6) **** Google .org email portion for teachers going away **

The LPS-1 wireless certificates are expiring this summer on XP machines. Any LPS wireless laptop that uses XP will have to have the certificate reset for it to work when we come back in the fall. This does not affect wireless devices that connect through the podnet.
 * 7) **** LPS-1 wireless certificates (on xp laptops) expiring this summer **

There are Internet Explorer 9 issues with DotNetNuke when uploading video. Using IE 9 your video is rejected as too big (no matter what size it actually is). Our filter cannot distinguish between Teacher Tube and You Tube. Dan Maas has tried to get the board to ease up on You Tube. The board’s response is that they hear no complaints from teachers. So teachers need to be voicing this if it has been a problem for them. The response from the tech committee is that the current filter blocking of You Tube is not impacting instruction in their classrooms. Stacey wants more videos on our site. So, what do we use? Where do we host these videos in DotNetNuke so it doesn’t get blocked here at school? How do we get video to show up on our presentations on our web site? Mike M says Teacher Tube is terrible when trying to get video to display from it. Heidi has also had problems getting approval from Teacher Tube for her video once she does the upload. Because of this, the videos she has uploaded to Teacher Tube never show up on Teacher Tube.
 * 8) **** IE9 issues with DotNetNuke when video uploading- What to use? School Tube? Teacher Tube? You Tube for Education? **
 * 9) **** Discussion regarding You Tube Filtering- should this change next year? **

Gwen sent out the professional development survey (with Heidi). She has had one person tell her it wasn’t working right. They got a message saying, “You cannot complete the survey.” If anyone has a glitch on filling out the survey, please let her know. Chrome seems to work well for it.
 * 10) **** Good of the Order **


 * *Next meeting Wednesday, April 25. **