Nothing Technical

The only downside to summer planning is all that happens is meetings. And once those are done, you have to schedule more meetings. Nature of the beast. The kids are going. The teachers are going. The buildings are about to empty. Facilities, Construction, Training, Summer School, Technology all want a chance at the empty buildings to do tasks, whether it be painting, waxing, moving AC units, continuing ed credits, credit recovery, and whatever we are supposed to do (phones, wireless, ipads, nooks, etc). Time to get on the same page to start. We all know best laid plans, etc, but at least if you start on the same page you can adjust. Here's hoping we get to the same page. Thats why the lack of technical fun recently. And I'm tired of getting errors with ipads trying to register as a device with NDES/SCEP. grrr. Need those 4-6 hours uninterrupted to turn up the debugging to really see what the errors are.

Coordination

Woo! Summer is almost here! Welcome to the beginning of an organized train wreck called summer project time. Well, not quite a train wreck, but does it ever feel like it. Trying to cram all work that was put off during the year cause it was too intrusive, too expensive, too time intensive into 8-10 weeks. I think we need a bigger shoe horn sometimes. Here are the few items we are trying to coordinate.

1. Construction at 6 sites
2. Summer School
3. Summer Cleaning/Waxing Schedule
4. Summer painting schedules
5. Technology projects
6. Start of new school year stuff
7. Vacations
8. Politics 

Ok. It is only 7 items. Each has anywhere between 2-20 sub-items beneath it. For example, who cares about summer cleaning, right? Well, everyone in the district does. The floors gotta -shine- the first day those kids come back. First impressions matter. And a shine with my big ol' hoof print in it isn't going to win me any points. So we have to schedule around that process which takes about 5 days per school with 4 schools going at a time. 

I'll even break out item 5, cause, well, that's what I do for a living.

• 5a -- deploy new phones to 40 sites!
• Pick up old phones
• What do we with the wall where the old phone was mounted? Yikes!
• deploy new phones
• verify extensions
• verify e911
• configure a fax solution now that we are all IP
• 5b -- deploy 1000 access points to 40 sites!
• Verify student, staff, and guest ssid's work right
• install about 100 switches to light up said APs
• 5c -- implement new email policy
• 5d -- deploy out 300 ipads
• 5e -- deploy out 300 nooks
• 5f -- deploy out 1200 new workstations/laptops
• 5g -- Upgrade internet pipe to larger size
• 5h -- implement new content filter

I'm sure if i polled my group, they'd add 2 or 3 more each. 

Anyhow that's what we do during the summer. Working with the other departments is fun. Teamwork matters.