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Secaucus Public School District
Progress Report on School Technology
September 22, 2009
The opening of school was very successful and teachers, who received in-service training, are looking forward to testing their newfound technical skills as they begin to integrate a new tool into their classrooms - the Interactive Whiteboards from Promethean.
In order to have this new and relatively expensive technology meet the exact specifications of both our Technology Coordinator and the detailed language contained in the bid specifications required by our Business Office, the purchase orders went out during the summer.
The whiteboards were shipped and began to arrive toward the end of the summer and it was decided to begin immediate installations at the high school level. While our in-house technical team continues to work on mounting of the boards along with the wiring to integrate the boards to our network, licensed electricians must provide the power necessary to complete the installations.
Although we hired an additional electrician, electrical wiring in a classroom must adhere to strict codes. A team from Promethean is also working with us.
As the installation proceeds, our technology staff, along with "helping hands" colleagues will assist teachers as they test out the integration this new teaching tool into their regular curriculum.
As teachers use the interactive boards and include streaming video and other bandwidth intensive media, it will test the limits of our existing network capability. To this end, we have placed monitoring equipment at key locations in order to determine which schools or departments require additional bandwidth.
This process will have a learning curve and we are asking our teachers to cooperate with our technology people to get this project through the testing phase. Interactive whiteboards bring us one step closer to becoming a district that uses emerging technologies to better prepare our students for college and careers.
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