The Lake-Lehman School District does have a storage area on its network. Each student and faculty member is assigned a space on their "U" drive. This can be accessed once you have logged onto a computer using your personal user name and password. Teachers can add class notes, power points, templates, etc. to the students' U drives. This is convenient for absences and setting up for large projects.
Our email system is through Novell. All teachers have an email address, but students do not. I mainly access my work email only at school, but there is an option to log on at home as well.
The most important thing I read in this chapter was about intranets. Lake-Lehman has started to switch over to an intranet for absences and pay stubs. I am hoping this will continue to evolve to eliminate the massive paper trail we have in the district. It will be nice to have a forum that everyone can access that isn't posted on our main webpage that anyone and everyone can see.
I wish we had the capability of accessing student drives! If I want to get a file to an absent student, I have to put the file in the Share drive, look up his info to login, and pull the file off of the drive myself. This is very inconvenient. The way I understand it, your school's method makes a lot more sense.
ReplyDeleteI also think that the intranet topic in the chapter was quite interesting. I wonder if it will be too much for some schools to keep a website up to date as well as a local intranet. It is a great idea for cutting down on paper usage as you mention. I imagine that you school has seen a cost savings just in changing over the pay stubs. I also think it is always a good idea to provide teachers with another avenue for collaboration especially a convenient and private one.
ReplyDeleteErin,
ReplyDeleteInternal network management tools for files seemed to get lost in the shuffle when the only point was to get classrooms on the internet. Your example of what will be online is excellent. With Aseop and My Learning Plan, many of your paperwork intensive operations are already out there.
One of the people I have been working with is from a company that builds portals for Single Sign On, very similar to what Wilkes uses for our registration and grades. Teachers could login to the portal and access online forms, Discovery Education, MyLearningPlan, Moodle, Email, and a host of other services that you need to enter secure login information.
Good Post!
Ty
It is interesting that the teachers in your district can access students' shared storage and can add (maybe also delete?) files there. I think this is a good idea for K-12 settings where the students may need more supervision. But if this access authority is given to faculty in a higher education environment, most students probably will feel over supervised. Can you imagine the teachers in Wilkes University are able to access students' shared storage drive, see the students' personal files there and even can modify the files?
ReplyDeleteI really hope your district will finally build up an intranet. Not only for schools or districts, I think any kinds of organization should have an intranet. It is even more important than having a public website. The public website is nice for public promotion, but an intranet is the place where the internal staff communicate, collaborate, and work together. However, according to my experiences of using an intranet in a corporation, I don't think it will help with elimination the paper use. Contrarily, everybody thinks it is nice to have a piece of paper rather than read the documents on the computer monitor.
We have a shared network drive as well. It's a pretty good thing to have. We recently moved over to Google Apps for education which should be even better.
ReplyDeleteErin, i have never tried to add things to students "U" drives. How do you do this?? I love the new paperless system. Half the time i forgot to even open my paycheck and fill out the absentee forms.
ReplyDelete