TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE MEMORANDUM

Thank you all for coming to the inaugural meeting of the Technology Committee. It is clear that Mulgrave has in this committee a wealth of educational, technical and operational expertise on both PC and Mac computers. I have attached a contact list - please check the details and provide corrections.

I do not propose to provide detailed minutes for meetings, rather to summarize our discussions and any recommendations, decisions or actions agreed. However, since this is our first meeting I will cover some general issues in this memo as well as our discussions this evening.

I am distributing this on paper, but I am happy to send future memo's by email to those on-line, if that is acceptable to you. Please let me know (awoods@direct.ca).

What is our Role?

I envisage that the Technology Committee has two primary functions:

1) To provide advice and recommendations to the Board on the School's systems and technology requirements, and the operational and administrative applications of technology.

2) To provide advice, expertise and research support to the Headmistress on the current and emerging educational applications of systems and technology, for possible use within the curriculum.

Where are we at?

We are well on the way to completing function #1 for this year's budget. Prior to tonight's meeting, the ad-hoc technical committee has been working to develop a systems plan for the 1996 / 97 school year -- particularly to develop recommendations for the initial hardware purchases within the budget approved by the Board ($30,000). In our planning, we have included the budget for the second phase of the Library system ($11,000) to ensure that our total systems planning is integrated.

We have developed a draft plan and detailed budget for purchase and installation of a dual-platform network system for the school which includes a file server, a number of workstations, printers and ancillary equipment, operating system software, and the network wiring. No application software has been considered as yet, except for the Library cataloguing and circulation programs. A detailed summary of this plan, prepared by Geoff Wheelwright, was circulated at the meeting.

File Server: This is a high speed pentium based server running Windows NT, which is the current operating system of choice for dual-platform networks. Please review the specification and forward any comments to me as soon as possible.

Network Wiring: The wiring will be 10 Base Category 5 Ethernet wiring with high speed Hubs and Patch panels. There will be three outlets in each classroom and at least one in every other room in the school. The outlets will accept both PC and Mac workstation connections. A preferred vendor has been selected and a Purchase Order will likely be raised within the next week to 10 days.

Workstations: We have proposed the purchase of 8 pentium workstations, each with CD ROM and 16mb RAM. The rationale to recommend all PCs for this year's budget was threefold: we have 5 Macs already which we anticipated using as workstations on the network; PC's are better value for money in performance terms; much of the new and innovative educational software is written or available for the PC.

We had intended asking a Mac vendor to give us ideas on how to use the existing Macs on the proposed network, but following tonight's meeting it is clear that we have sufficient expertise on the committee. We have scheduled a meeting of the planning group for Wednesday morning (Nov 6th) to discuss the options for the existing Macs. Following that meeting we may recommend upgrades, or that one or two of the workstations proposed in the Plan be changed to high performance Macs or Mac clones, in order to give us the systems flexibility necessary to take advantage of the available software choices. Please feel free to join us in the Library at 8:15 am - but please note the meeting will be limited to this topic only.

Ancillary Equipment: We have put together a package that we believe meets our needs (see the Microtech quote), but please feel free to make suggestions on any part of the list proposed. I have already added headphones to the list!

Installation & Set-up: We will be doing this ourselves, since we have willing volunteers with the necessary expertise (so far it's Bill & Geoff). Once equipment starts arriving, I will be asking for further volunteers!!

Our next full committee meeting (Q. Is Thursday 7th November at 7:30pm OK ?) will be focused on the hardware issue. I hope following that meeting we will be in a position to recommend a detailed purchase package to the Board.

We have not yet begun to address our # 2 function -- that's our next task and is the more fun part of our committee's role. We will touch on it at our meeting next week and, since the children will no doubt want to begin using the new computers as soon as they are available, I have asked Mrs. Hamer to speak to us on her general vision for the computers in the classroom, and Mrs. Ferguson to speak on some of the immediate applications that the staff envisage.

From that, we should have a clearer idea on the direction the committee should take and some ideas to set our agenda for the coming year.

In general, I would like the format of our meetings to be : 1) dealing with current issues or problems as they arise; and 2) discussion of a specific topic set for the meeting. I will be asking for suggestions from you on the approach we should take and topics for future discussion.

Andrew Woods.