November 2005 — Features
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Warming Up To Wireless
Specifics of the canopy are still being worked out, but Dodge says the district will extend wireless coverage with the help of towers from Proxim (http://www.proxim.com) set atop each of the district’s 27 schools, along with additional wireless services from Motorola (http://www.motorola.com). He notes that every student in the district would be given a Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) key to access the network from home.With that key, students may have as much wireless access off campus as they do on—namely, the ability to use laptops for just about anything available to them online, including a thin-client login to their individual folder on a centralized terminal server. Stay tuned.
Laptop Management: How It Works
What d'es it take for a school district
to distribute 9,500 laptops every year?
Planning—and lots of it.
Strength may be in numbers, but don’t tell that to a good many K-12
school districts, which have found that the process of handling large
volumes of wireless laptops can be problematic for any administration.
Not so for the technologists and administrators at Irving
Independent School District. There, six members of the Technical
Services department and numerous campus staff members have
made a science of distributing, maintaining, and collecting laptops,
doling out more than 9,600 of them to students every year. The
result is a program that keeps getting better.
At the heart of the laptop program is logistics—a process that begins about a month before school opens, when technologists prepare the computers for distribution, replicating and loading the same hard drive onto each one. Over the next few weeks, the campuses send home paperwork for parents to sign, turning over responsibility for the equipment to their children. A week before school begins, the district collects $50 from each student to support a uniform insurance policy. Finally, in the three days before teachers report for duty, each student must swing by school and pick up a laptop complete with class schedule.
“Everything is transacted before students even think about the first day of class,” says Alice Owen, Irving ISD’s executive director of technology. “The whole idea is to make the computer as much a part of the regular school procedures as possible.”
To make sure the system runs smoothly, the district purchased its laptops with full four-year warranties that cover everything from microchips to batteries, and all the pieces in-between. The district has bolstered this investment by covering the cost of Dell repair certification for six of its own technicians; that way, if the need arises, the machines can be fixed in-house. While Owens says that ordinary wear and tear causes most students to have at least one problem with their computers every year, most repairs are handled quickly and painlessly.
Jacob Milner is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA.
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