21st Century Learning #40: Jason Hyams and School Web Portals

EdTechTalk: 21st Century Learning #40
Jason Hyams and School Web Portals
April 24, 2007

Jason Hyams joins us to discuss St. Agnes School's impressive web portal where you can download Microsoft Office, get your homework assignments, submit help desk requests for your laptop and more. Also hear about their wireless network that serves 750 simultaneous users!

Next week we have Lorrie Jackson from the Lausanne Laptop Institute, a summer program for schools with 1:1 laptop programs. That's Tuesday May 1st, 1:30 PM EST (GMT-4) at EdTechTalk.com.


Click here for the show notes




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[arvind] hi dfincher
[dfincher] Hi--I'm here from São Paulo
[arvind] excellent
[arvind] glad you're here
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[arvind] hi hwarren
[arvind] welcome
[hwarren] thanks
[arvind] where are you from?
[hwarren] macon georgia
[arvind] if you're not listening, click the sound icons for channel A on the top right of the page
[arvind] does the audio sound ok?
[hwarren] it is good
[arvind] Thursday, our special show on girls and computers: http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/1592
[arvind] then next Tuesday, the director of the Lausanne Laptop conference: http://www.laptopinstitute.com/
[arvind] and the week later, may 8, Tim Lauer, the web 2.0 principal of Lewis Elementary. His blog: http://tim.lauer.name/ His Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/timlauer
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[JenMad] Stream sounds great!
[arvind] hey Jen, good to "see" you!
[JenMad] ditto that!
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[arvind] open access point. when you open your browser, you log in to their backend
[arvind] hi smenegh
[arvind] if you're not listening to the stream, click one of the audio links below under EdTechTalk A
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[arvind] hotspot based printing, interesting concept
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[smenegh] Trying again
[dfincher] Just click on the 64 kbps
[dfincher] It's streaming fine for me.
[arvind] feel Free to ask questions of Jason Hyams, our guest, the Director of Tech at St. Agnes school in Houston, TX: http://st-agnes.org/
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[alex.ragone] yeah... proxy server problems.
[arvind] 4000+ notebook repairs/visits last year!
[dfincher] What software is used for the service tickets?
[alex.ragone] We're using web help desk.
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[arvind] we have a home grown solution
[arvind] Jason is homegrown as well
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[dfincher] I'm trying to avoid doing homegrowing here because whenever the person who sets it up leaves, nobody knows how to maintain it.
[hwarren] Do the families pay for the laptop in addition to tuition and other costs?
[alex.ragone] I'd recommend web help desk: http://www.webhelpdesk.com/
[dfincher] I was looking at their site and they offered a chat. We have Numara Track-it.
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[arvind] Xythos digital locker: http://www.xythos.com/home/xythos/products/digital_locker_suite.html
[alex.ragone] Blogging and Forums were the way they communicated with students and faculty.
[dfincher] We use iFolder for our teachers with laptops, and it's possible to access it through WebDAV using Netstore from Novell
[alex.ragone] How do you like it?
[dfincher] iFolder is great--I never worry about losing anything on my laptop.
[alex.ragone] Nice.
[dfincher] Our goal is to get to a point similar to St. Agnes--how you access your resources is independent of where you are in the world
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[dfincher] Are you doing packet shaping? What's the bandwidth at St. Agnes again?
[alex.ragone] 10 Megs -- can scale to 1 Gig
[alex.ragone] dfincher -- where are you from?
[dfincher] São Paulo, Brazil
[arvind] what school? if you don't mind us asking
[dfincher] We run two E1s
[alex.ragone] Nice.
[dfincher] Graded--The American School of São Paulo
[alex.ragone] Welcome.
[dfincher] Thanks
[alex.ragone] It's nice to have an international audience.
[JenMad] Validates my decision to stay on the "user" end of technology     Glad there are guys like you around!
[JenMad] Nice show ... thank you Jason!
[dfincher] Good podcast.
[dfincher] Tchau
[arvind] thanks,
[arvind] glad you joined us
[arvind] the audio will be posted here on edtechtalk.com later
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[arvind] we dropped the stream, good to talk to you all
[arvind] next week more on laptops with Lori from the Laussane Laptop Institute (conference)

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Comments

great show guys!

on the off-chance Jason is responding to comments here...

does your Xythos webDAV solution serve as your back-up solution (for your users who want to back up their personal data)? what's the quota?

thanks,

Demetri