Fife Schools Technology

The past week’s weather gave us many opportunities to use our automated call system. This also gave us the opportunity to answer some questions about the system.

Read the FAQs here: http://www.fifeschools.com/depts/tech/help/CallSystemFAQs.html

After several months of work by Qwest, Fife schools now have all campuses connected by fiber optics. This means all schools are accessing network and Internet resources faster.

Prior to this upgrade, it was difficult for some buildings to use Internet content in the classroom that require higher bandwidth such as audio and video. It was also very difficult to use some of the district’s critical applications such as our student information system between campuses.

Two Internet resources that are now more accessible to the classroom are SchoolTube and TeacherTube. These are school-friendly alternatives to YouTube. It will be fun to see all the ways that teachers will use these rich sources of curriculum to create engaging work.

Without getting too techie, having fiber optics will allow us to save some costs by reducing the number of separate connections we have between campuses. For example, our phones and computers will be able to share the same lines. Also, we’ll be able to centralize some of our servers in one location instead of needing redundant copies of servers all around the district.

Overall having fiber optics will make a big difference in how we use technology, both directly to students and teachers and behind the scenes.

One of the no-so-fun computer tasks is cleaning up old files. They take up hard drive space and make it harder to find the stuff you really need. While it is possible to increase storage space (and we do so as needed), it is hard to justify purchasing more hard drive space unless we’re making good use of the space we have.

It can take a lot of time to look for old files but here is a hint to make that a more efficient process. Search for the largest files first and delete or archive those files no longer needed. Here’s how I do it:

1. Open your My Documents folder (this will work with any folder).
2. Click on the Search button on the Task Bar.
3. Click on All files and folders on the right margin.
4. Leave the name field blank.
5. Click on What size is it? and options will appear.
6. Click the Large (more than 1 MB) option.
7. Click the Search button.
8. After the search is finished, sort the list by size by clicking on the Size label at the top of the list to show the largest files at the top.
9. Decide if you need those large files and delete or archive somewhere else.

Hope that helps.