LETTER: in defense of school technology plan

Palm Coast Observer
Opinion

Note: This letter was written in response to Brad West’s letter, which criticized the Flagler County School District for its new technology plan.

First I will say I understand the concerns and agree cloud technologies are moving very quickly into the mainstream. The district has been moving in this direction for years now, starting in 2008 with the purchase of our Stoneware Unified Cloud platform. Stoneware has allowed us to build a hybrid cloud consisting of both internal services and hosted services.

Over the past five years, we have moved many applications to a hosted cloud environment and reduced the number of servers the district information technology staff directly supports by half.

We have piloted cloud projects with both Microsoft and Google. We started working with Google Apps for Education during the 2009-10 school year, but there proved to be too many issues relating to the Children’s Internet Protection Act and archival of transactions. The following year, 2010-11, we worked with Microsoft on the Live@EDU platform because of its promise to meet our requirements regarding CIPA, archival of student transactions, and its tight integration into our Microsoft Active Directory Services. From an IT prospective, Live@EDU fit the bill, but the collaboration component and user experience was lacking.

During the 2011-12 school year, we worked with both Google and Microsoft. Microsoft had just released Office 365, and Google was now offering free tools to meet out CIPA and archiving requirements. We ultimately chose to move forward with Google Apps because of its user experience, flexibility, and its tight integration with many of our already cloud based systems.

We spent the 2012-13 school year integrating and testing the Google Apps platform with existing local and cloud systems.

So moving forward, the district’s plans rely heavily on cloud technologies. Students will receive a new district account with Google Apps and Google Drive integrated into it when they get their laptops. We will no longer be supplying students with traditional email accounts or home directories. This will help to continue to reduce the number of servers the district must support.

We also feel moving forward with Google at this point will give our students the benefit and flexibility of both traditional productivity tools, Microsoft Office, collaborative cloud tools and Google Apps. Delivering these technologies on a MacBook gives us even more flexibility. We can supply the best of the best traditional productivity and creative software as well as the latest in cloud collaboration and productivity tools, and, when our StoneWare Cloud is added to the mix, we can offer traditional and legacy Windows client server applications.

Choosing to move forward with the MacBooks also helps by leveraging the many years of experience and staff development that teachers and students have already had. It will allow students who may not have Internet access at home to have access to powerful software for both multimedia production and word processing as well as plenty of local storage to cache web content.

It also address the ongoing issues the district faces as more and more high stakes testing is taking place on the computer. Currently and for the near future, state testing is not supported on newer mobile operating systems or cloud-based devices.

We feel we have created a highly flexible learning platform, leveraging traditional and cloud-based resources that will prove to bring great value to our students, teachers and community.

Ryan Deising
Flagler Schools director of technology