What to look for this school year

A new school year is here with all of its excitement, anticipation, and promise. With this new year we're debuting a new website at http://westborough.org! (You'll want to visit the new website and replace any bookmarks pointing to the old schoolwebpages.com site.) The new site has more photos, social media links, and an improved calendar. We're continuously working to organize our large collection of existing material into the new site, add new material, and train teachers, administrators, and support staff how to use the new system. We appreciate your patience as we work through this and your flexibility as you adapt to the new site.

In the tech department our mission is one of empowerment and as we work with the students, faculty, staff, and administration on technology issues we'll be focusing on creating a culture, infrastructure, and platform that empowers us all. To help understand the needs, prioritize the resources, and coordinate the actions we're bringing back the School Technology Councils, volunteer bodies at each school that represent the range of stakeholder groups. The STCs will be charged with identifying new opportunities to improve teacher practice, student learning, and administrative efficiency, coordinating logistics, training, and professional development, communicating internally and externally, and assessing the results. Our work process will be based on the principles of Design Thinking where we move from proof-of-concept to pilot to small, medium, then full scale build-out, iterating quickly through cycles of divergent thinking to generate ideas, prototyping and testing to see how they work, and then converging to focus on advancing those that work best. The idea is that we learn to crawl, then walk, then run.

As we work we will be looking for opportunities to change how we do things that will save money, improve service, or both. For example:

• Improving mobility, quality, and productivity of teacher computers by moving teachers to laptops, expanding the selection of operating systems, and repurposing former teacher desktops as student desktops
• Switching from slow and expensive desktop inkjet printers to faster laser printers and multi-function copiers with significantly lower per page costs
• Reducing the total cost of ownership of our devices by re-assessing the balance between quality and quantity.

The following opportunities have already come to our attention as being high impact/high priority:

• Google Apps for Education - making more of the tools available to more of our students and expanding how we use them
• Google Classroom - has been enabled for teachers so we can try and play and learn, but hasn't yet been made available to students on anything more than a pilot basis. We'll be making it available to students as we learn more of the implications and become satisfied that there are no negative, unintended consequences.
• Increasing WiFi coverage and density for better individual and whole-class performance
• Making our web filter smarter and more flexible so it blocks fewer useful sites
• Increasing students' awareness of how to project their best online selves to their community and the world
• Behind-the-scenes infrastructure updates, upgrades, and reconfigurations that will help us to expand and improve our service offerings

we've already started the following:

• We've already been able to greatly increase our Internet bandwidth and Gibbons is scheduled to have it's WiFi fully built out by the end of September
• We're launching our proof-of-concept pilot for Google Classrooms
• We're piloting workgroup printers in some schools
• We're offering a range of trainings and PD using Google and other tools

Finally, in the next week or two, we will:

• reconvene the committee that is evaluating replacements for iPass and resume that project
• resume the work of planning the district-wide telephone upgrade that we paused in late August to minimize disruptions to the start of the school year

There are a lot of great opportunities for us to pursue and the work we do this fall and winter will help move us forward in the moment, inform the budget for next year, and will also help us develop our plans for the next 3 to 5 years.