Fife Schools Technology

Starting sometime during the night, Hedden lost its network connection to the district and beyond. Qwest believes it is a failed piece of hardware used by their fiber optics.

This affected Internet, email, and a few other services for Hedden.

Connectivity should be restored soon.

We apologize for any inconveniences.

Update: Qwest finished the repairs and the network is back up.

In an effort to conserve resources (dollars and environmental), we are making steps towards technologies that will help us to reduce costs and to use less energy and materials.

Virtualization is a computer technology that allows multiple computers or servers to run on the same hardware. So, for example, we can take three servers and “virtualize” them, allowing all three servers to run on a single piece of hardware but still act as three separate servers.

Imagine if your family had one car but three family members could use that one car at the same time to go different places. You would spend less than if you purchased three cars, spend less on fuel, etc. That’s a little like what virtualization can do in the computer world.

As a result, we can reduce costs by needing less hardware, less electrical power, less air conditioning to keep server rooms cool, etc. It’s also easier to manage virtual servers in the long run.

We’re also looking at ways to create virtual desktops and virtual applications. This would allow us to use smaller, more efficient, and less expensive computers in classrooms yet still deliver the power students and teachers need for their classwork.

In future posts, I’ll give some specifics about how we are doing this. 

This Sunday (Feb. 22), Tacoma Public Utilities will be doing some work on the electric power at the district office. As a result, all computer related services will be down throughout most of the day. The scheduled work time is from 8am to 5pm.

This outage includes:

• website
• portal
• email
• in-district logins and home directories at the ESC and FHS
• voicemail
• other potential services as well

While staff should be able to use their computers at all schools (other than FHS) on Sunday (should you need to come in to work), there may be some services that are not available.

Last week, the world’s attention was on the inauguration of President Obama. Many classrooms watch this historic moment either using cable/TV or via the Internet. I was very interested to see how our newly installed fiber optic network would handle the traffic of the streaming video.

While I don’t know how many computers in the district streamed video that day, I know that overall, it was one of the highest Internet traffic days in history.

The great news is that our network handled the traffic very well. I was streaming CNN most of the day to see how it performed and had no problems getting a continuous video stream.

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.

Today we had a phone and network outage at Hedden. Phones, email, and Internet access were down and unfortunately it took longer than expected to bring services back.

What happened?

Qwest is currently having a contractor bury fiber optic cable along 8th Avenue to connect Hedden (along with others in that area). Due to the unfinished construction and the wet weather, it appears some existing circuits got wet and “shorted out”. Once Qwest isolated the problem, they were able to repair the connection.

We were able to use our new phone messaging system, SchoolMessenger, to notify all Hedden families about the problem in case parents needed to reach the school by phone. It’s a great system!

We apologize for anyone inconvenienced by this outage.  A big thank you to the Hedden staff for being good sports.

I’ll be talking more about our fiber optic installation in an upcoming post.