Network Testing

Stumbled upon this article in the recent ASCD SmartBrief.  Districts are deliberately overloading their networks to see if they are truly prepared to implement online testing for all students.  I learned that Burlington, MA used a similar approach when they did sample PARCC testing last spring.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/01/29/to-prepare-for-online-assesments-some-schools-try-to-break-their-own-networks.aspx

Meeting Notes 1/20/15

Minutes of Committee meeting

Attending: S Green, T.Quinn, R. Fitzpatrick, BJ Chauvin, L. Lynch, D. Parker, M. Joyce,  M. Hauck

Network Consultant: Rick reported that he, Suzanne and Tammy have met with two consultants - FTG and EOS - and are awaiting proposals from each before proceeding.  We should receive responses from these firms within a few days.

EducatorU: contract is signed and executed; Michael will contact them to set up a meeting and get going on implementation planning.

Blog: Michael has set up a private blog for the committee to use as a discussion forum regarding key planning and implementation issues with Google Apps.  It is private to ensure security of our conversations.  Each committee member should have received an invitation to become a member & author of the blog (sent to their gmail account).

Domain organization:  we agreed on the organizational scheme that was initially proposed:


User provisioning: we discussed the proposal that Michael had put forward, with 12 key applications. Google+ was dropped from the list because, supposedly, it is not available in Google Apps for Ed. [Will this impact access to and usage of Hangouts?]. The initial proposal also stipulated that email service would not be accessible to alumni, but it was determined that email would be need to transfer Drive files [Need to investigate further the process for changing ownership of files]. We also agreed that both Sites and Blogger would default to accessible only within the norfolkaggie.org domain.

There was a general feeling that there was insufficient understand of many of these applications to make definitive decisions. Michael took the action item to present a brief overview and demo of many of them. Laura will set up Michael's account in the new domain to use for this exercise.

Task teams to tackle key issues: we began discussing several of the key issues that are ahead and the idea of forming small task teams to investigate, analyze, and propose solutions. No conclusions were made and this is an open item for next meeting.

The meeting was adjourned at 3:15

Committee Meeting 1/20/15

Tech Committee Meeting

Tuesday, January 20, 2015  at 2:30pm

Trustees Room, McFarland Hall

• Network diagnostics consultant status update - Rick
• EducatorU contract status update - Rick
• GAfE planning blog (gafencahs.blogspot.com)
• another invitation sent to your gmail account
• Google Domain user organization
• User provisioning - which apps and privileges
• Key decisions moving forward (form 1-2 person task teams to investigate, analyze, propose solutions):
• email migration (incl group & personal address books);
• do we keep EdLine?  How long?
• user training - how do we find the time? One size does not fit all.
• document migration (users, public, administration)