NPS Tech Advisory Committee

Today, Janet and I made a small presentation to the PTSO Board at Newton North. Our purpose was to update them specifically on what's happening with respect to the North PTSO website and directory. Our talk covered that and also the NPS? TAC? more generally. Here are the highlights.

NPS TAC 2008-2009 Projects

• Learning (Lead: Shelley Chamberlain)
• Learning Management (Lead: Missy Costello)
• PTO Communications & Directory (Lead: Erik Britt-Webb)
• Overall Communications (Lead: TBD)

PTO/PTSO Communications & Directory – Primary Goals

• Improve information access and collaboration within each PTO through the use of common/shared infrastructure
• Dramatically streamline and improve the sharing of calendar events and news items across the district by enabling district-wide (and multi-school) events/news to be shared in a structured way down to local school PTO websites (via content syndication) and vice-a-versa
• Dramatically streamline and improve how PTO contact directory information is gathered, validated, published and maintained
  • For each PTO
  • Across PTOs for families with children in multiple schools
• Make it easy and secure for appropriate school constituents to interact across a range of Newton school and PTO websites, using a single identity and authentication credentials (rather than having to maintain different ones for NorthPTSO.org, WardPTO.org, NPSTAC.org, etc.)

Pilot Projects

• Being conducted simultaneously at www.NorthPTSO.org, www.WardPTO.org and www.NSPTAC.org.
• Implemented local calendars that are slowly getting populated
• On WardPTO.org, provide an archive of email blasts (coming soon to NorthPTSO)
• Working feverishly on short-term online directory gathering process/tools, while long-term solution is ironed out
• In the next couple of months, looking to tackle the challenge of receiving, editing and organizing content for the NorthPTSO and WardPTO email blasts

Help Needed

• Graphic designer to improve look & feel of these websites
• Technically-minded person who can help configure modules being used to power the functionality of these sites (using the Drupal?.org system, but little to no programming required)

FYI...

November 10, 2008

Dear PTO presidents,

It is hard to believe that I am in my third year as Director of Information Technology.  I am pleased to report that we now have a comprehensive three-year technology plan in place.  (See http://www.newton.k12.ma.us/Technology/techplanning/index.html).  Although none of the technology budget initiatives planned for year one got funded due to the override failure last year, we are still implementing parts of the plan that can be done with available resources. Suffice it to say, we could not move forward with replacing old outdated hardware without PTO help and generosity.

I also understand that PTOs want to be certain that their money is spent wisely. As part of our three-year plan, we have outlined guidelines describing the number of computers and peripherals that should be available at the schools in order for students to have “hands-on experience” using technology on a regular basis. (See Appendix A of the three-year tech plan, pages 43-44)

In addition we have a business practice of maintaining equipment standards across the district.  To maintain these standards it’s important that all PTO purchases be coordinated with the Instructional Technology Specialist or Library Teacher assigned to your building along with the Coordinator of Instructional Technology, Steve Silverman.  This coordination will ensure that purchases are aligned with district and state recommendations.

You may be wondering why we adopted this standard policy.  The school system owns and maintains 4,500 computers.  Our department provides the training for both instructional and administrative staff in the use of these computers as well as the integration with the curriculum.  In choosing computer models to purchase, we use the "total cost of ownership" approach.  There's more to the cost of a computer and related equipment than the purchase price! It must be integrated into our existing network, server, and software infrastructure and be maintained and supported through its useful life.  Given our limited staffing levels and the budget realities, we need to choose equipment models and configurations that offer proven reliability and consistent internal components.  This greatly improves our support efficiency by maintaining a common hardware and software platform that applies to instructional or administrative computers throughout the district.

In summary, even though the price tag or configuration of a computer may be modestly higher than some “special of the month,” our instructional technology standards are part of a much larger strategy that has been developed with careful planning and research in order to offer the highest value over the life of the computer.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.  And again our heartfelt thanks for all the support you give us to replace and maintain our IT equipment.

Sincerely,

Shelley B. Chamberlain

The following message is being distributed through NPS? PTO newsletters. If you have a chance, I recommend that you take the survey too.

To: Newton PTOs

The School Committee has appointed a subcommittee to review system-wide security policies and to make recommendations to the School Committee on how to deal broadly with security issues. That subcommittee has prepared a draft policy and had discussions about how specific security measures then might be implemented. The School Committee is scheduled to vote on the policy in November. This survey is designed to seek community input on some of the areas under discussion. We hope to get a lot of survey responses from PTO members.

Following on the topic of Online Payment Options, I was in another conversation about how to handle the large volume of requests to include community service advertisements in the PTO newsletters. It would be nice if there was a non-intrusive way for community service providers to advertise their services to families through the PTO newsletters AND at the same time, for the PTOs to make a little advertising revenue.

As I was documenting some findings for Online Payment Options, I also discovered the Paypal Node module. Module is designed specifically for taking online micro payments in order to post content to a website (which could then flow into the PTO newsletters). This sounds like a perfect solution for the allowing people to advertise in the school PTO newsletters, while the PTOs make a little coin off the advertisement.

Recently, I've been talking with some fellow PTO technologists about "best practices" in enabling PTOs to accept online payments. Several PTOs have Paypal buttons on their sites that take the visitor to a Paypal page where s/he can make a donation.I'd like to see some better options.

Assuming a PTO website is based on the Drupal? system (as North and Ward now are) here are a few Drupal-based modules that could be useful in the future.

The Ubercart related modules is probably much more than we need at this point. It supports the whole product catalog, in addition to payments. Might be good if we’re selling school apparel and accessories, but too much right now.

The e-Commerce related modules may be better fit. Less focus on managing a product catalog.
 
The fee and donation modules operate on the Simple Paypal Framework module. This could be the simplest way to collect online payments that is at least a little bit integrated into our site.

I’ve been working with the newsletter people at Ward PTO and North PTSO to setup PicasaWeb accounts for collecting images to use in their respective newsletters. I’ve been finding it difficult to USE the images one they’re in the albums. It’s just not as friendly as I had hoped.

So, I’ve been thinking about changing course and suggesting that they turn on the Image Gallery features native to their respective PTO websites. As an example, I have created a couple of image galleries on this site.