INTEGRATE Meeting
Meeting Minutes		 December 8, 2011
Collette Center
 
  Organization   Organization   Organization   Organization
X
 Appoquinimink
Indian River
X
 Smyrna
UD
Brandywine
X
 Lake Forest
Sussex Tech Diocese of Wilmington
Caesar Rodney
Laurel   Woodbridge
X
 Providence Creek
X
 Cape Henlopen
Milford
DOE
Academy of Dover
X
 Capital
X
 NCC Votech
DSEA   Moyer Academy
X
 Christina Polytech   DSU     Business/Other Entities
Colonial
X
 Red Clay
X
 DTI
X
 Strata Logica (Herff Jones)
Delmar
X
 Seaford
DSCYF
X
 Thinkfinity

Total Meeting Attendance: 21


 

Denise Tuck
Thinkfinity
  • Our Thinkfinity grant will officially end on December 31, 2011.
  • The Verizon Foundation has chosen a different direction for their funds and will not continue their support of Thinkfinity as they have in the past.
  • Thinkfinity as a portal will continue to exist. We have been told that around June or July there will be changes to the look and feel of the portal but the partner resources will still be searchable.
  • Science Netlinks - recently relaunched their site and they have completely reformatted their URLs. They now have redirects in place but you may experience difficulties in finding resources. Their focus is now student-focused instead of teacher-focused so some resources may look completely different. Additionally, resources that were in pdf format are now being moved to html format. If you are looking for a pdf, you may need to search for the resource again. If you need a resource and can't find it, let Denise know.
  • TIMS, the system where all Thinkfinity session were logged, will be going away. If you have any sessions that you have not uploaded, please do so now so that our final report is as accurate as possible.
  • Professional development and webinars will end.
  • They have six partnership schools where they are studying technology integration and use of Thinkfinity. They are also studying how mobile devices can be used in the classroom.
  • Denise shared the Dr. Chris Dede video that is in the Thinkfinity Community. You can access the Community site and looking for the Education Speaker Series.
Wendy Modzelewski
INTEGRATE Update
  • iSAFE
    • December 15, 2011 - full day of training with Jonathan King
    • INTEGRATE members are welcome and are welcome to bring others (sign up through PDMS).
  • Digital Learning Day Campaign
    • http://www.digitallearningday.org
    • Considering "A Day in the Life of a Student with Technology"
    • We are open to other ideas. If you have something you would like to suggest, please let Wendy know.
  • Project Tomorrow - Speak Up Survey
    • Survey is now available.
    • Delaware has always had a high percentage of participants. When you receive the information from Wendy, please forward to your staff and buildings. Data will be available by district if you are interested.
  • Learning Registry
    • http://www.learningregistry.org/
    • As per the web site: The Learning Registry is an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes, and an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web.
    • Wendy's Power Point presentation.

Eric Austin
Randy Reynolds
DTI

  • Live @ EDU
    • Contracts have been signed.
    • Resources have been allocated towards this project.
    • DTI is again familiarizing themselves with the migration and is working with districts to set up migrations.
    • The hope is that a pilot district can be done over Winter Recess. It is planned that Capital will be the pilot district. They are working on timing.
    • If the pilot goes smoothly, they will be able to reach out to other districts.
    • DTI MUST be done on July 1 to have all the migrations completed. This is due to the licensing of iMail as that contract expires July 1, 2012 and there are no plans to renew.
    • Naming conventions will be standardized (firstname.lastname). Once a district migrates, the plan was to forward mail from iMail to Live@EDU. Forwarding rules will be carried over into Live@EDU and carried for some period. Eric is thinking the forwarding will be generous.
    • If there is mail stored in iMail, it will be migrated. This is a timely process (hours) so they are going to do this over a weekend or overnight. They may not be able to see the mail right away, but eventually the mail will migrate. In the meantime, the individual will still be able to access iMail and see the mail but they will not be able to do anything with it (forward, send, etc.).
    • Personnel address books will not be migrated.
  • What's coming in educational technology?
    • DTI needs to plan two years in advance for major purchases.
    • DTI is interested in knowing what the future needs in educational technology are so that they can plan accordingly.
    • For example, Red Clay is now doing video conferencing within the district to teach classes. If other districts were thinking about moving in this direction, DTI would want to know since this raises bandwidth issues. DTI is very close to purchasing a video bridge with the Division of Libraries.
    • Red Clay is looking at a blended solution for instruction. They have been using Edline (recently bought out by BlackBoard). There are cloud-based solutions such as Homework Handins where students can upload files to EdLine and the teacher can grade them (in school and at home) and keep them in the Edline environment. They are also looking at Digital Textbooks using iPads or the Nook (over the Kindle). They would put these in the high schools.
    • Seaford is using Open Education Resources (OER). They worked with K12 Handhelds to align open resources to instructional units which were later converted to KUDs (for LFS). A project that came off of that were media sets (videos, primary source docs, etc.) that could be put into a folder. Students could then access the folder of media and create student projects. Seaford has realized that they could move to eliminating textbooks but they don't have the fiscal resources to make the transition.
    • Smyrna - They went from almost no laptops to 1200 (1/3 of their student body) in two years. They
    • Discovery Ed is putting together a science textbook that they are creating with a publishing company. They were calling it a "techbook." They are looking at a $40 fee per techbook for 5 years. New content would be added, natural disasters would be covered, updates would be automatic.
    • NCCVT -Their Superintended is looking to move towards a 1:1 initiative; Howard HS is definitely doing this next year.
    • St. Edmonds went to an iPad for every child in grades 6-8. This is parental purchase. (shared by Judith).
    • www.ck12.org - Open Education textbooks (free).
  • Bandwidth was discussed at some length. He followed up the discussion with an email on 12/9 with the following:

    Our bandwidth conversation was abbreviated today so I wanted to review it to ensure that there is a uniform understanding.  Sorry for the length...

    For this example we'll assume a 10Mb/s site.  If a single user is downloading a large file they could get 10Mb/s performance.  If two users are downloading a large file they'll each get 5Mb/s performance.  When 50 users are all downloading simultaneously, each person is getting .2Mb/s (or 200Kb/s).

    In reality, it's rarely the condition that users are continuously using the network.  What is more common is a user clicking a link on a web page which takes three seconds to load, followed by five minutes of reading, followed by a three second click/load...  When 1000 users act in this manner, the number of users with overlapping three second download windows is so small that users still generally have far more bandwidth than is necessary to run their applications.

    Now to YouTube.  YouTube changes this behavior a bit.  Now, it's click and download a large video so instead of it being three seconds, it could be long as the length of the video (10 minutes, 2 hours, etc).  The video plays as it’s downloading but the download has to be fast enough to get the data before it needs to be displayed.  If you watch a YouTube video, you'll see a red progress bar indicating your "viewing" progress and a light gray bar showing the video "download" progress.  As long as the download progress outpaces the viewing progress, the video should play seamlessly.  While the required bandwidth varies wildly for each video, we'll use 256Kb/s as a ballpark on the low side.

    Lets say in a given school 50 YouTube videos are being downloaded simultaneously (teachers, students in labs, etc).  What's the impact?  At a 10Mb/s site, assuming nothing else is happening, the per user bandwidth is now .2Mb/s (200Kb/s).  While that is likely adequate for a 51st user to get on and use "regular" applications, you may notice that the per user available bandwidth is now less than is required for YouTube to stream.  Streams will now hang intermittently during playback.

    So, is YouTube going to kill your WAN uplink?  There is way too much to consider to answer that generically.  Too much of anything can.  So far, we have seen supportable utilization at districts that have enabled it.

Denise Tuck
Thinkfinity
  • Science Netlinks -
    • Launched their redesigned site. A portion of their resources have not been put up on the net since they believe that science does change and that their resources should be updated to the new look-and-feel.
    • If you have resources bookmarked, check them out before you go to teach with them as they may be missing.
    • There is a link to contact them if you would like a missing site to be expedited.
  • Project-Based Learning Workshop
    • November 28, 2011; full day
    • PLEASE register NOW. As of Tuesday, 11/15, we will open unreserved seats on a first-come basis.

Internet Safety
iSAFE Curriculum Walk through
Wendy Modzelewski
Alyssa Moore

  • An overview of the curriculum and how it is organized was provided to the group. All resources are available on the DCET internet safety web site.
  • Alyssa Moore (Christina SD) has made that district's curriculum available as a sample. It details the content and lessons that they use in each grade level. Her scope and sequence will be updated as soon as she has it ready.
  • Wendy presented a Power Point that explained the FCC released its long-awaited CIPA rule revisions incorporating the E-rate provisions of the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act enacted in 2008. Due to this mandate by the Federal Communications Commission, all schools receiving eRate funding must have an internet safety curriculum in place and being taught to students. By nature of the State K12 network, all public schools are indirectly receiving eRate funds.
  • By law, an internet safety curriculum that the LEA has in place must "…include monitoring the online activities of minors and must provide for educating minors about appropriate online behavior, including interacting with other individuals on social networking web sites and in chat rooms and cyber bullying awareness and response."
  • Also, you MUST update your district/school internet safety policy to include language that states that the district/charter has this curriculum. Suggested language is available on the DCET internet safety web site in an eRate Central document called the CIPA Policy Primer.
Vendor Visit

Lindsay DeLong, M.Ed.                 
Strata Logica
lrdelong@herffjones.com
215-990-2534
For the Good of the Cause
    1. Share something about your school/historic part of your area in the State
    2. Twitter - post something new you did
    3. Virtual Field Trip of the State
      1. Wikispaces - each district has a page and they post
      2. Historical landmark
      3. School
      4. Economic contributor to your area
      5. Unusual feature to the area
    4. Pages in a book?

 

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please notify Wendy Modzelewski of
any errors you find.

Minutes last updated on December 22, 2011