Auditorium and Stadium Projects

The Norwalk Performing Arts center and Warrior stadium are finally reaching a semblance of completion. I have been tied up in both of those buildings pretty much non-stop since August began.

Both projects are quite involved and have chewed up much of my free time. We had our first home game in the new stadium last Friday night and things were a bit off. The Newtek Tricaster device -which is resposible for mixing the live video feeds from our multiple cameras and streaming it to the video board and online -- was only showing greyscale images. It was very disappointing for all involved. We could not get the streaming URL and encoding file entered into the device at all as it was being worked on all the way up to --and including-- the varsity game. So I apologize to anyone that was looking for the stream and missed it. It wasn't there. We have another game in two weeks and I hope to have it all operational by then. We have had a couple big events in the new Performing Arts Center. One was the all staff meeting that we have every year. It normally would not be that big of a deal, but since it was the first event ever in there, things were on edge the whole time for me. Since then we also had the Iowa Teacher of The Year presentation last Thursday. Charity Campbell, our MS PE instructor won the award this year. She is very deserving and you probably saw the picture on the school homepage. See it here as well.

So that's the latest for now.

February Cadre meeting

Follow up results of the latest secondary cadres meeting.
We would like one system to enter communicable information into, to save time for staff. We have chosen that tool to be Infinite Campus. The Lesson Planner module will allow us to post events and assignments so that parents and students have one place to look for homework and grades. Very elegant. So far that is the expectation we would have of all 6-12 faculty. If there are documents that need to go to students outside school, they need to be hyper-linked from within Infinite Campus.
That way, at least tentatively so far, if you wish to use Google Apps or Moodle, you can simply link to the documents, where-ever they exist.
We are still working on where the students go to find things, but at least everyone will have one common place to update and go to find information.

Google Apps rollout plan

Well, next month we begin the Google Apps roll out to staff here in Norwalk.
The proposed plan is to do the main tools one per month.
So,
February - Google Docs
March - Sites
April - Groups
May- Gmail (if I can get approval for it by then)

Tech Day in the Fall - Copier training, Google Docs, Sites, and Groups training.
This plan gets our staff exposed to, and starts them using Google Apps by the end of the year and gives them the summer to work with it. Then more training in the fall when we plan on rolling it out with the students.