High School Reform History of This Site

Note to self...

Don't tell anyone I'm working on the holiday weekend, people might get the idea that I don't have anything better to do. Franklin's site is nearly fleshed out. Main site and the counseling department are mostly put together. The rest of Franklin will be done by Tuesday. Then I'll move on to the next high school in the district. Oh, the new URL's for the sites are:

High School Reform
Franklin High School Reform

Try them out and let me know what you think. You can use the email links there or write me directly.

Labor Day Scramble

I've been doing some analysis on requirements for the Franklin counseling database and access to it. Have also worked a little with Franklin to understand their needs better in a broader sense. But, mostly, I've been preoccupied with other things. As luck would have it, I'm back at this stuff just in time for everyone to be mostly unreachable due to the holiday weekend. The PPS internal network couldn't support underscores in hostnames so I'm moving the sites to new domain names. By the end of the weekend, Franklin's stuff will be as far as I can go with it until people return to work to have a look next week. I believe Wilson is next so I'll start that next week (or possibly even this weekend.) You'll be reading more on a daily basis again, so stay tuned.

Data, Information, Mis-Information...

We had a meeting yesterday at the University of Portland. All the high school principal's were there, lots of administration personnel, the new superintendent, consultants, and lots of other folks. The topic of the meeting was Data and the use of it in the district. We used the blog work to access the data and presentations (they are all online) and many people expressed an interest in getting the URL to the site. Many others expressed interest in getting sites for their school. Most of the administrative staff that went to the meeting has at least the knowledge that the sites are there, but as with most new stuff, it'll take a repeat of the messages and more content on the sites to get people hooked.

26.2 Miles... Athens is Saved!

To set the record straight... the runner really ran a little less than 25 miles, unless Marathon and Athens have become farther apart since 490BC.

So I didn't run a marathon this weekend, but I did burn alot of midnight oil getting the reform sites up for a presentation tomorrow. Got the documents up on the district level site, as well as the Franklin site. Lynne put together a good "about" section so I put that up too. Updated some previously uploaded documents. I switched the links section over to blogs because it gives some additional functionality. So the sites are very interactive at every level, and they also allow all sorts of filtering and authentication/password protection too. Most of the structure is in place now, so it's a quest for content now. I'll probably move this blog off to the district level reform site and use Movable Type to implement the blog. Bloglines has been serving me well to now, but there's really no reason to keep this blog here. The presentation is mostly about what the schools are or should be doing in the area of instruction and reform. However, all this blog stuff is interesting to folks (mostly because they've heard the term but are not sure what the heck it all means.) So I'm guessing that we'll have a crowd of folks asking questions and reviewing the sites and (hopefully) providing some more input.

It's ALIVE!.....

The site I mentioned yesterday has been up for less than a day now, but it already has more than 100 hits (page views of the site from people on the Internet.) Cool huh... the power of making things accessible to everyone. Yeah, I know that not everyone owns a computer but it doesn't take too much creativity to look up your local library to use one of their computers or to borrow one of your friends computers... especially if you live in the US. I've made many additions to the site... after phone conversations with Lynne (what does she do anyway? -- that's what the site's about so visit it if you wanna know!) and Jennifer (Franklin HS -- who happens to be out of town on vacation at the moment but is a hopeless workaholic, sending me ideas via email and vmail from her PDA phone.) Stay tuned for more updates. The "schools" link for Franklin will soon be changing to point not to the Oregon Public Schools site for Franklin, but rather to the new Franklin Reform site I'm building (which will look just like the PPS Reform site, but will be in the context of Franklin's Reform efforts.) OH... and thanks to all the people visiting the site. Feel free to send me ideas, comments, and words of enthusiasm. Constructive criticism is always wanted... all other criticism should be directed at yourself :)

Movable Type

Lewis Elementary runs on the blogging product Movable Type. There's a "newer" version of this software available as a hosted service called Typepad. I've created a blog on Typepad to play with the newer software to see what it has to offer. It'll be available as High School Reform

Blog, Moodle, Kit n' Kaboodle

Sixteen hour days can lead to weird blog headings. We met in the dungeon... uh... conference room at Franklin High. Scott Robinson (CTO) was unable to attend, so Jay Keuter was there representing Scott's organization. I presented a recap of our discussions to date, and each of the other attendees (Lynne George, Jennifer Frentress, Carla Randall, Tim Lauer) chimed in with additions. Charles Hopson (Franklin's Principal) sat in on some of the meeting. Jay gave us some information that seemed to contradict some earlier info we got from the CTO so I'm opined that it had something to do with the fact that Jay has been out on vacation. However, at this time someone needs to answer 1)Does PPS-IT have sandbox server(s) now? 2)Are those servers accessible both internally (within PPS's network) and externally (from the Internet?) 3)What software is on them? 4)What is the policy about loading software on them? For example, can users (like me) load a blog tool (like Movable Type) onto those servers or do we need to ask an IT person to do it? What is the prioritization of requests on the sand box servers (relative to other systems.) Ideally, the sand box servers would be very low security to allow those with logins to configure anything they might need to do quick prototyping and pilot activities. 5)What is the availability of the sand box servers? In other words, will they be up 5-9's or are they going to be taken offline periodically and without warning? Anyone wanting to answer these and related questions is definitely welcome to post the answers. 6)What tools are available to service collaboration and communication needs.

A Chat with the CTO

Scott Robinson (PPS Chief Technology Officer - CTO) met up with Lynne George, Jennifer Frentress, and Jim Frentress to discuss all this communication and collaboration stuff. We met at VQ on 8/2/04 (hey... it's sunny in Portland and we're not gonna pass that up by sittin' inside!) Lynne did what I thought was a great job of relaying the status of the project, and Scott appeared to be a quick study on the matter. Scott talked about security issues related to some of the system capabilities we want to implement, but at the same time agreed that these are the capabilities that organizations with good communication are using. Recently there were some virus problems on the PPS networks that resulted in shutting down the chat system. Scott said that his organization had already setup a sand box server ("a big box" he called it) for testing out new technologies. He said that half of the sand box was accessible to the outside world, and half of it was accessible only from inside the PPS network. Lots of IT's time has been taken up with upgrading non-switched 10MB networks, and migrating websites and other servers to the centralized data center, but the worst of that infrastructural stuff is completed now so that strategic initiatives can be addressed (such as data warehousing, content management systems, and collaboration systems.) Scott said that he would attend our next meeting and demonstrate some tools available within IT to address communication and collaboration needs.

Veritable Quandry

I highly recommend Veritable Quandry, a quaint little spot in downtown Portland where you can eat or drink outside on a sunny day (as we did on July 28, 2004.) Yeah, I know, I edited my posts and all the dates have changed. Now you're all upset at me so I apologize for breaking a rule of blogging. Now ya know why blogs are typically non-editable.

At this meeting, Carla Randall (President of Wilson High School) joined Jennifer, Lynne, and myself to discuss the whole idea of banding together to leverage technology that Tim has used and built for Lewis Elementary. When Lynne described what we were thinking about doing, Carla said "How do I sign up?"

We decided to bring the PPS Tech folks into this discussion to give them insight on needs as expressed to date, and that meeting will be called by Jennifer after communications with Scott Robinson (PPS CTO.) The hope is that IT has some technologies and a sand box to test out some of our ideas in.

In the beginning...

The group of folks enumerated at the bottom of this post gathered together on a hot summer day (July 28, 2004) to yak about the subject of communication and collaboration in the Portland Oregon Public School System. Turns out that it's hard to know what everyone's doing and even harder for anyone to quickly and efficiently communicate with others regarding all the wonderful things going on in education reform.

Tim showed us his (almost famous) LEWIS ELEMENTARY.ORG site built by him using Movable Type software. It's pretty cool and very useful. Even more useful is the internal site (I'm not posting that address here because Tim may not want that to be public, even though it is "usually password protected" ;)

Steve talked about his company and offered to replicate the Lewis Elementary site for use by Franklin as a sort of sand box to play in.

Jennifer bought me a cappucino and two yummy breakfast rolls... thank you sis! (yeah... Jen's my sister.) She also talked about the lack of tools to publish and track what she and everyone else in PPS is doing regarding education reform. Having recently returned from a conference in Boston that covered this topic, she asked questions about blog, wiki, newsgroup, and other collaboration technologies.

Lynne talked about her needs which, not surprisingly, pretty much mirror those expressed by reps from Franklin High School and Lewis Elementary.

In summary, people want a way to publish, on a very frequent basis (daily, weekly at least) activities related to school reform. Lots of awesome work is happening on this front, yet there is no way to get the word out and let people watch the progress/process.

Attendees at this meeting: Lynne George, Jennifer Frentress, Tim Lauer, Steve Burt, and yours truly Jim Frentress