Technology chiefs in big districts face a difficult balancing act in striving to meet the diverse needs and goals of teachers, administrators, students, parents, and other stakeholders. The larger the school system, the greater this challenge becomes. Add in the fact that schools can be notoriously slow to implement change, and you have a minefield of potential pitfalls on the way to progress. Yet despite all these challenges, a respectable number of large K-12 districts have visionary leaders achieving genuine successes. To help K-12 administrators in school systems of all sizes--but especially in other large districts--learn from the successes of their peers, the editors of eSchool News present the Ed-Tech Vanguard Report, a publication dedicated to documenting the ed-tech successes of America's greatest school districts.
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Florida's Orange County Public Schools
| Orlando Magic
Technology helps take Florida’s Orange County Public Schools to new heights.
Read how Florida’s Orange County Public Schools--the nation’s 11th-largest school system--has been transformed through the successful and ongoing implementation of innovative technology solutions. As a result of a district-wide shift in culture, student achievement is on the rise, and OCPS is widely recognized as a high-performing school system.
•Cultural shift
•Driven to succeed
•Learning beyond the bell
•Key OCPS vendors
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| Cultural shift
In Florida's Orange County public school system, technology has been the catalyst for a major shift--to a system in which data collection, student tracking, and assessments have coalesced seamlessly to improve student achievement in remarkable ways.[ more... ] Driven to succeed
Thanks to Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, in the coming months parents of students in Orange County Public Schools will be able to subscribe to a service that will alert them automatically by cell phone or pager when their child's school bus is a certain distance from the bus stop.[ more... ] Learning beyond the bell
As a solution to the contentious issue of whether teachers should use digital-age communications tools, Orange County Public Schools are empowering teachers through a program that allows them to create their own web pages, blogs, and podcasts, while being guarded against the misuse of such tools.[ more... ] Key OCPS vendors
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Chicago Public Schools
A Better Way to Bring Computers to Schools
The Chicago Public Schools' unique governance structure --all schools are given full autonomy over how they spend their technology budgets--poses some significant challenges for the district's Office of Technology Services (OTS). For instance, how can it ensure the equipment each school buys meets certain minimum standards and will work together? How can it ensure each school is getting the best value for its dollar? And, how can OTS meet each school's support needs? [ more... ]
Agents of Change
South Loop Elementary, one of CPS's 602 schools, is a public neighborhood school centrally located in Dearborn Park, in the heart of Chicago's South Loop. The walls are decorated with murals, an alcove has been turned into a jungle, and "I Can" statements adorn the bulletin boards. These statements are written by the children and serve as goals for the year. One such statement reads: "I can use the internet to research information about a topic." [ more... ]
How to Eliminate a 40-Year-Old Mainframe
For the Chicago Public Schools' Office of Technology Services, switching from an ancient mainframe to a series of state-of-theart information systems was not a one-size-fits-all initiative. [ more... ]
Calling on New Technologies
With approximately 24,000 school district phones (including 2,700 at its central office), 600 PBX and key systems, 16,000 centrex lines, and more than 1,200 data circuits, the Chicago Public Schools' telecommunications infrastructure was massive. To bring the system into the 21st century--and ultimately save millions of dollars in telephone line charges--the district's Office of Technology Services decided to make the switch to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. [ more... ] |
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Broward County Public Schools, Fort Lauderdale, FL | Blueprint for success
Outside the Broward County, Fla., Public Schools administrative offices, the air shimmers with heat, the sky is hazy with humidity, and by 9:00 a.m. the air already feels stale. [ more... ]
Ed-tech accountability
Broward County Public Schools desperately needed a system to manage their IT projects. But IT veteran Becky Schmaus knew that any vendor she contacted to help create such a system would first ask, "What is the current process?" [ more... ]
Out with the old ...
Last year, Broward County Public Schools embarked upon an ambitious, $68 million Digital Learning initiative with two goals in mind: (1) to provide students with greater and more equitable access to technology, and (2) to improve the district's tech-support model. The result: There is now one wireless laptop computer for every six students in the district--and tech-support costs have plummeted. [ more... ]
Doors to data
For a school district with more than 300 applications running on more than 600 servers, the ability to have a single source of entry for unified access to all of that information was a dream of Broward County's Education Technology Services division. Broward officials wanted to have "one web site [where] you could log in as a teacher, student, parent, or administrator and see the things you need to see," says Vijay Sonty, the district's CIO. [ more... ] | | Fairfax County Public Schools Features(June 2006)
Stellar tech use
In the vanguard of education, the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in metropolitan Washington, D.C., are committed to expanding the frontiers of learning with their stellar use of technology. [ more... ]
Data-driven instruction
When Oak View Elementary School Principal Debbie Lane discovered her fourth-graders were struggling to pass a state-mandated exam on social studies skills, she didn't panic; instead, she turned to her computer, and the district's data warehouse, for answers. [ more... ]
Round-the-clock education
In Virginia's Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), technology and the internet are helping to transform learning--a practice that, at least in most school systems, traditionally stops and starts with the school bell--into a round-the-clock enterprise. [ more... ]
Lights, cameras ... interaction
Housed in a former elementary school and tucked away in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Fairfax County, the campus of the Nancy F. Sprague Technology Center seems an unlikely place for a modern technological marvel. [ more... ]
Self-made manipulatives
Used to be, when the school year ended, teachers would start planning for the following year by sifting through mail-order catalogs and ordering supplies, never really knowing for sure if what they were buying ultimately would resonate with a new batch of students--many of whom they might never have met before. [ more...
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