Amazing August Tech Updates

The summer months are always a time of intense activity for district staff. Penn Manor’s IT Team has worked ardently to prepare for the 2014-2015 school year. Here are a few project highlights from a summer that felt entirely too short!

Centralized Online Student Registration
After a successful spring trial of online Kindergarten registration, we implemented centralized online registration for all new students enrolling for the 2014-2015 school year. The new system is a major reconfiguration of our registration procedures and represents the first significant process change in over 15 years. Changing PDE data reporting requirements are a driving force behind the change. Nearly 350 new students have been registered via the new system. Welcome to Penn Manor!


Relaunching the PM High School 1:1 Program
We’re excited to start the year with our 1:1 student laptop program fully engaged. Laptops have been refreshed with the latest version of Ubuntu (14.04) and dozens of open source learning software. Approximately 350 students took advantage of a our summer take-home program. All other Penn Manor High School students will receive their school laptop during the first week of classes.


Teacher Laptop Upgrades
Marticville Middle and PM High School teachers are returning to new laptops as part of the district’s 4 year teacher laptop refresh. Teachers were given the choice of devices. The options were a single 13” Macbook Pro or the two-for-one-deal of a 15” touchscreen Acer laptop plus a 10” Android tablet.

Teachers received the new laptops during an August technology workshop. Along with the laptop upgrade we have fully implemented ownCloud, a district-hosted automatic backup and file synchronization service, for all K-12 teachers.


Hambright Elementary and Manor Middle School Building Technology
New construction and building renovation work mean new data cabling, new projectors, and new classroom technology systems. Both buildings received serious network infrastructure upgrades, including high-capacity fiber and CAT6 network cable. We’re also very excited to implement HDMI audio/video in each classroom.

These highlights are only part of the summer story. The overall volume of district IT work during the past three months has been extraordinary. I’m so proud of my capable, creative and tenacious IT team. August could have been awful; my staff worked together to make it awesome!

 


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