Rob Sexton hit the ground running when he arrived in Granville full time May 1 as the school district’s new director of technology.
The successor to former technology director Dennis Souder, who died unexpectedly in summer 2010, Sexton said there were no special challenges in dealing with the district’s 1,300-odd computers, some 200 staff laptops and everything that runs them.
“Just your standard stuff,” Sexton said during an interview this summer. “Servers needed updating. Those are common, every-year computer-cycle kinds of things. Nothing major.”
When school starts Wednesday, there will be a host of new capabilities with the school district’s technology.
All four schools and the administration building will be wireless.
A new telephone system is running off the district’s data network, and phones basically will become computers, although they still will function like traditional phones do.
Students will have their own email with lots of storage space.
An all new “virtualization” networking system using three main servers will replace numerous, separate servers dedicated to specific singular functions. The new servers also provide electricity to power up devices such as computers, phones, cameras and wireless access points.
Upgrade positions students to better compete
Superintendent Jeff Brown calls the upgrades something that was “desperately needed.”
“Our goal through this upgrade was to position our students to compete in a global learning environment,” Brown said in an email. “As we prepare students to be successful in a global market place, they need to be confident using the latest tools to research, communicate and engage the broader community. This technology upgrade will create opportunities for students well beyond the four walls of the classroom.”
“We want to be the (best) technologically,” Sexton said. “We want to be a leader in the state. We already have great teachers. We’re giving them great tools to keep on doing the great job they’re doing in the classroom.”
The wireless capabilities will allow transport of carts full of laptop computers from one classroom to another without losing speed, Sexton said.
“Before, if you wheeled two carts in a single room, you have 32 computers and you have one access point,” Sexton said. “We had all these hot spots all around the buildings, but we didn’t have building-wide coverage, and we didn’t have it built for density.”
“Depending on the number (of laptops), it could get slow,” he said. “We can handle a lot more computers at any location. We just took the great job that Denny did and carried it on.
“Before, we were going through a garden hose,” he said. “Now, we’re going through a fire hose.”
The increased capabilities take the general public into account, too.
“For the wireless, there’ll be a guest network for the community when they come in,” Sexton said. “If they have a mobile device and they need to get online, they will be able to as well.”
New phone system brings many benefits
The new telephone system, among other assets, will analyze a voice message and turn it into email, Sexton said.
“You can call in, and it will read your emails,” he said. “Before, the red light would show up on people’s phones. They would notice that light, call in and check their voice mail. Now, it just shows up in your email.”
A major plus, Sexton said, will be the ability to video conference.
“This system can do video conferencing with anybody on the planet,” he said. “Just send them the invitation, then click on the link, and they become part of it, which really opens up the opportunities for our classrooms. It’s really going to help our students prepare for the future.”
“Let’s say an English teacher is communicating with an author, and they want to bring that author into their classroom,” he described. “They can video-conference them in from anywhere in the world.”
Email for students has many benefits
Students will have their own email addresses as part of a new overall email system, with the domain name granvilleschools. org, necessary with the arrival of the new phone system. Staff members also will use the new domain name but will still be reachable through their current domain laca.org.
“Students will have 25 gigs of online storage,” Sexton said. “Their documents will follow them to wherever they have Internet access.” Students also will get the online version of Microsoft Office that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, the latter a note-taking piece of software.
“It gives you the option of communicating on a more personal level,” said STAR student Logan Rogers, a 2011 GHS graduate who continued working with the STAR team this summer.
“If a student has the ability to use email at school, they can transfer documents to teachers. They can collaborate with other students working on projects or mentor each other,” Rogers said. “It’s a common link they now have.”
If a student doesn’t have Microsoft Office at home and doesn’t want to spend the money for it, they can access it through the school’s system.
“It’s enough to do what you need to do, and it’s accessible,” Rogers said.
New servers do it all
Three new servers will do the work of many smaller ones the district had been using, Sexton said.
“You buy a server and instead of just having one operating system on it, you can have many,” he said. “We have three, and we’re running well over 20 ‘virtuals.'” Some smaller, repurposed servers will continue in use, he said.
“We really only had one server before, which did it all,” he said. “That thing was a good seven years old. In computer age … it’s like dog years.”
With pressure to curtail spending in part because of the loss of almost $1 million per year in education funding from the state, the new technology is arriving at the right time.
“We’ve selected equipment that has no recurring costs,” Sexton said. “We have lifetime warranties and lifetime updates. We tried to avoid purchases that have long-term recurring costs.”
With virtualization, he said, “We don’t have to buy as many physical devices, which contribute to power consumption. It’s a tremendous savings over buying a bunch of physical servers. There’s a lot less heat, which makes our air conditioners work less.”
With the new equipment, an upgrade in operating systems to Windows 7 is taking place, replacing Windows XP, and everyone will have Microsoft Office 2010, the latest version.
Power management devices have been installed on computers “so that we can shut them down and put them in hibernation, so we use a lot less power,” he said.
STAR students key part of change
Sexton, like his predecessors, will continue to rely on the district’s STAR (Student Technology Aids and Resources) program, a team of students who help maintain the district’s technology.
“I would never have been able to accomplish this if it wasn’t for our summer STAR students,” he said, a group managed by systems administrator Glenn Welker.
“It’s a critical piece to operations, having as many computers as we do,” Sexton said of STAR. “Two people couldn’t keep up with all that without the student assistance.” The students install software, redistribute new equipment, clean computers and do some network wiring among other things.
“Really just paying attention to detail,” Sexton said, “to go around and notice things that aren’t quite right and training them to pick up on those things.”
Sexton estimated that generally 12 to 14 students per school year are involved, and this summer there are eight.
“We have such sharp kids. I can’t say enough good things about them,” he said.
