Greetings to everyone from St. Joseph’s Indian School. The technology department has a very busy schedule during the summer months. Many hours are spent installing new computers, rebuilding older computers and making sure everything will work when the students and staff return for the new school year. Computers are put on a five-year rotation and the teachers are on the top of our list this year. They will be excited to see new computers when they return in the fall. Before that, we must take out the old computer, clean it up, vacuum it out, remove all the old data and rebuild it to be put back into a classroom for student use. These are used as standalone computers for educational games for the students.
We are also installing eight promethean boards in the school classrooms. Promethean boards are student interactive learning systems that greatly enhance student education. As you might be able to sense, the technology department builds some muscle in the summer!
Along with computer changes, there are many software changes that need to be made over the summer. We write a lot of our own computer programs here at St. Joseph’s Indian School. The programs range from keeping information on each student to tracking their educational progress. Creating our own computer programs, enable us to “tweak” the program to our exact needs. The summer is the time to make these changes. The list seems to grow each year with minor changes to some programs, adding a few reports to other programs or creating a whole new application for staff to use in the fall. Don’t forget the training on these new programs – we’ll be preparing for that as well.
Telephones are another responsibility for our department. Our current telephone switch is quite old so plans are underway to replace it. New telephones need to be setup to be compatible with the new system.
Since every piece of technology always works here, we don’t have to worry about technical support. What am I saying? Of course, it’s normal around here, there always seems to be something not working somewhere. We provide technical support for the entire campus which means days filled with nothing else. This can make our days very interesting and also very frustrating, but we enjoy it very much! We strive to be a very user-friendly technology department.
The guest bloggers are really giving us an idea of all the work and skills that go into keeping St. Joseph’s running smoothly.
A well oiled machine.
I am glad to see that your school is tracking its graduates and following them beyond your campus with your databases. It’s important to keep the “ohana” (family as they say in Hawaii) that you all have built with them living on and returning to your campus each year. Even extending this family to when they are continuing their education to help guide them or give them that extra support.
I am really enjoying the guest bloggers! And thanks to Mike for a very interesting look into the technology in use at St. Joseph’s! It’s all most impressively current and thanks so much for all your caring work!