EduTech Steering Committee

October 2, 2009

EduTech Steering Committee
October 2, 2009

RIT Inn and Conference Center

Members Present:
Bruce Amey, Avon Joe Backer, Letchworth
Camille Sorenson, EduTech Bob Leiby, Red Jacket
Joan Cole, Elba Jim McNeil, WFL BOCES
Tim Hayes, Geneseo Terry MacNabb, Waterloo

Members Absent:
Mike Crowley, GV BOCES Joe Marinelli, WFL BOCES
Mike Glover, GV BOCES Maria Ehresman, Williamson

Guests:
George Schwalb, EduTech Lisa Roberts, EduTech

·	Camille introduced George Schwalb, EduTech MTS Manager who will be presenting a life of technology guideline at the request of the Steering Committee. George came to EduTech in February of 2009. He has an extensive IT background in the business and higher education fields.

·	8 Question rose as to why some districts are changing from Novell to Microsoft.
	At this time Microsoft is growing faster than Novell.

8 Districts have virus protection for their technology, but need to be looking at spyware
	and malware. Currently EduTech is reviewing three products to protect for spyware
	and malware. Microsoft has a free product called Microsoft Security Essentials that looks to be promising

8 Need to keep track of operating system lifecycle and EduTech can help you with that.

8 Maintaining brand integrity helps with the flow of your network.

8 Don’t forget about the wires in the wall. Especially with older buildings in school	districts. Wire does age. EduTech would be willing to come in and work with technology coordinators.

8 With the cost of laptops coming down, the question was raised whether EduTech and
	school districts would look at student owned computers being used in the school setting.
	Could this have budget ramifications for school districts? This is a district policy issue. Discussion needs to take place because constituents will start asking for it. Geneseo
	already has student owned laptops on their network through the acceptable use policy.
	Will need requirements and restrictions on the machine.

·	NYSED State Data Collection & Reporting Governance Changes

SED heard the field say they are discontent with the communication process, data movement, reporting back of the data, NYSTART System. Commissioned a study and as a result instituted a number of organization, control, and communication changes.

2009-2010 Testing and Report Cycle – Lisa Roberts

Lisa congratulated the districts on a successful 2008-2009 test scoring process. The 3-8 process went extremely well with answer sheets being delivered early, which helped with the process. The quality of the answer sheet scoring was very good.

Challenges for 2008-09 included tracking the Special Ed students’ enrollment information, including those referred to CPSE. There were also gaps in the 9-12 arenas in quality control issues with scoring the Regents.

Districts should look into establishing quality control measures. Tim Hayes asked for suggestions on quality control and asked if peer review would help. He finds that teachers are not taking bubble sheet seriously. EduTech could develop an Access database where the information is inputted and the program does the addition. Joan Cole asked how districts are notified of the discrepancies. Discrepancy reports are sent to the test scoring contact. The committee asked that in the future these reports be sent to the Superintendent.

Challenges for 09-10

² Student enrollment information must go from CSE to Registrar constantly. Someone in the department needs to be responsible for telling the person entering data into
the student management system. Need to involve more than one person on the listserv. Comments were made around the table that originally this was supposed to
be a part time person in the district and has now turned into a full time, if not multiple
person, job.

EduTech is in the testing stage for developing a report that lets you know when a
student is in Special Ed, but not the student management system.

² Quality control of teacher bubbling on back of score sheets.

² Rolling out a tool in early spring for districts reporting corrections on their data. Districts are going to need to get us all their historical corrections by May 1.

Answer Sheet Delivery Schedule
NYSAA 5/6/09
3-8 ELA 5/13/09
3-8 Math 5/20/09
NYSESLAT 6/3/09
Science 4 & 8 6/17/09
Social Studies 8 6/24/09
Regents 6/24/09
.

Answer sheets will start arriving the beginning of May. It will be very challenging to do
ELA and math with only a week in between. Like last year, will have districts bring answer
sheets to us. Have already had a request from a district to be two days late in May and we
have already had to say that although we are sympathetic the answer is no.

·	Miscellaneous Items

Business is booming and last year we had the biggest year ever with close to $12,000,000 in SAA’s. March, April, May and June saw $6,400,000 in SAA’s. All that work funnels through all the departments.

10-11 Budget will be flat. Will probably be looking at an increase in FTE for Project Coordination. This has been our largest volume in SAA’s with the lowest number of Project Coordinators. Numbers for July through September this year are considerably higher than the last two years. Bob Leiby asked if we could allocate someone on a temporary basis. Camille will look into it.

LAKENet upgrade: Upgraded all the districts this past summer. For internet purposes all the districts have more bandwidth.

Honeoye & Penn Yan are the two districts who never joined LAKENet. Honeoye is now becoming a member of LAKENet.

Thin Client: Classlink with Palmyra-Macedon. Allows teachers and students access from home.

A couple of years ago EduTech did a pilot with white box computers. The unanimously committee agreed to not support the technology at that time and to revisit in a couple years.
We are looking to do a pilot with Wayland Cohocton and Seneca Data.

Kindles: At this time there are some logistic issues to work through. Currently only able to purchase Kindles through Amazon using a credit card. If EduTech purchases on our credit card for school districts, books purchased in the future by school districts are also charged to EduTech credit card. Joan mentioned there are other book reader features out there. Maybe we should be talking to school library people and see what they recommend.

New services -
Que Centre: facilities management (Pending)
CapPro: capital projects management (pending)
Day Automation: (perhaps)
Demographics study package: (perhaps)
Cyber Insurance (perhaps)

Joe Backer asked if there is anything for blocking cell phones in your district. Camille will check into it.

Email archiving: Camille provided an update on the technology, service.

Next meeting on November 17, 2009
RIT Inn & Conference Center