Background:
The San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) provides support to 43 school districts and several schools in the area of information technology. While SDCOE encourages schools to obtain support services from their district, occasionally SDCOE will assist individual schools in their technology efforts.
Goals/Vision
In the Fall of 1992, the County Office of Education's Information Management Services unit authored a comprehensive needs assessment and strategic plan based on 80 personal interviews with county and district staff. The purpose of the study was to identify client needs, prioritize those needs, identify and acquire the necessary resources to meet those needs, and develop an implementation strategy in a fiscally sound and responsive manner.
Two prevailing comments during the interviews were that "technology should not be a separate framework" and that "technology must be part of the process." In an effort to bring technology into the classrooms in San Diego county, SDCOE began its venture into internetworking.
SDCOE's involvement in computer internetworking stems from the initiatives of the "Three Southern Regions Consortium," which, in trying to save resources, set four principle goals:
- to establish a communications network among the counties in southern California;
- share contracts;
- establish a common computing architecture; and
- standardize data.
Integrating instruction/classroom/administration capabilities is at the heart of SDCOE's goals. The office envisions itself serving as a technical hub for districts that wish to connect to the Internet and will provide the expertise to access and use the Internet successfully. For those who already have a history of using the Internet, SDCOE is prepared to offer help where needed but will not get in the way. They hope to build on the success story of a few districts to help apply momentum to the concept so that eventually all districts will be able to use the Internet effectively. The concept has been embraced by the California State Curriculum and Instruction Steering Committee and the State Business Administration Steering Committee.
Technical Solution
There are currently four networks in place at the County Office. SDCOE runs both Novell and AppleTalk networks. They are presently not interconnected but will be in the near future as SDCOE's internal wide area network is currently being implemented.
All districts are connected to the SDCOE Unisys mainframe through a combination of lease lines and dial-up using terminal emulation software. It is the SDCOE's goal to establish LAN connections to all district offices within the county.
SDCOE connects to CSUNet through CSU at San Diego via a 56K line. This CSUNet solution met SDCOE's needs and a similar implementation was in use at the Los Angeles County Office.
The benefits of this connection are that it supports both business and instructional needs, is in place already, and is time-proven. The disadvantages are that it is somewhat difficult for the infrequent user to use without assistance (to that end a help desk capability is being implemented) and its telephone line-based topology does not readily offer some of the potential offered by some of the higher bandwidth-based topologies, such as fiber, microwave, etc.
Funding
CSUNet allowed SDCOE to become functional without a large financial expenditure. No grants were sought because the length of time to acquire one would have severely hampered SDCOE's ability to become functional by the summer of 1993 (their driving objective). Therefore, all funds for San Diego's networking were allocated from existing budgets.
Training and Support:
SDCOE has implemented a help desk that handles technology support and training and will be a combination of internal SDCOE networking personnel and college student workers from the San Diego area. They have had marked success in using student workers to augment their work requirements and will continue to use that capability. SDCOE's concept is to have expert personnel available at all times via telephone who can help users access the system and can also help them navigate the Internet.
SDCOE plans on expanding their very proactive help-desk services. They see this as being a major step in removing the "difficult to use" criticism of CSUNet/Internet. After gaining some experience/expertise in supporting CSUNet and the Internet, they will find ways to blend some of the other capabilities of other networks into their scenario. SDCOE is already working with UC San Diego toward that objective.
In addition, SDCOE's Technology Consortium provides a wide variety of education technology workshops, academies, services, and activities to pre K-12 educators and others throughout the San Diego and Imperial Counties. Included in their offerings this fall is an Internet class.
SDCOE also has acquired and equipped two vans with computer laboratories. Both labs were outfitted with eight workstations, each for less than $1,000. These vans are literally mobile training facilities and are maintained and staffed by college students. Initially, staff development courses were offered through the traveling labs. The labs have since expanded their offerings to include technology training.
San Diego County Office of
Education Contact:
Harry "Skip" Sharp
Director
Information Management Services
San Diego County Office of Education
6401 Linda Vista Rd.
San Diego, CA 92111-7399
Voice: 619-292-3500
Fax: 619-279-2953
