Fife Schools Technology

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.

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.