Thursday, November 29, 2007

Odyssey of the Mind is coming

The Odyssey of the Mind teams are formed and working on their solutions. We welcome Union Springs back this year. The Regional Competition will be held on March 15 at the new BOCES Regional Education Center on West Genesee Street Road in Auburn. We are excited to be hosting this at our new facility. The preliminary number of teams is 68:
§ Auburn – 13
§ Cato-Meridian – 6
§ Jordan-Elbridge – 3
§ Moravia – 6
§ Port Byron – 5
§ Skaneateles – 23
§ Southern Cayuga – 5
§ Union Springs – 3
§ Weedsport – 4

Important dates and information are available at our website

Thursday, November 15, 2007

LTAC Meeting Notes

Five districts and the CNYRIC were represented at the meeting today. Deric Tallman, from CNYRIC, introduced School World. It is used to build web pages and is available as a service from the CNYRIC. Port Byron, Jordan-Elbridge and Union Springs are already using it.

WAN Update/Centrex/tech plans were discussed. Rick Dillon explained the Centrex RFP which is out now. Districts are interested in looking at changing the way they look at phone service. 3 districts currently have Centrex agreements that need to be renewed or dropped. The WAN is now complete with the addition of Southern Cayuga. The Tut will be installed soon at Port Byron. Linda will check with Kathy Smith about the e-rate requests recently distributed. It appears to duplicate what Tony has asked for.

The group requested that we look at Nortel and Cisco phone solution demos for January. Rick and Linda will coordinate.

The Distance Learning room at the Regional Education Center is being installed today.

Rick discussed the CNYRIC move "across the street" to RODAX. The current RIC building will become OCM BOCES administration.

Randy Ray is scheduled to speak at the next LTAC about retention of e-mail. Steven Tryon from Oswego BOCES may come to speak on web building tools.

The School Library System now has 6 districts on OPALS and Auburn is considering it.

Jerry is catching up on AV/computer repairs. He talked about the Xerox/Tektronix printers and the plastic failure in them.

Linda talked about Soundzabound, the royalty free music, that was purchased for high schools a few years ago. There is now a fifth volume which will be purchased for each high school through the ISS co-ser.

Linda introduced middle school science teachers to video clips which are MP4 and can be loaded and searched within I-Tunes. They were excited about their use. Disks will soon be available for them to use and for districts to add to servers if they want.

Next meeting is December 20.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Media Request Facts

Our new media system provides some interesting statistics.

The top 5 requested videos were:
Cells
Ocean Life
Donald's Fire Drill
Dying High: Teens in the ER
Pseudoscience

The search used most often was Bill Nye.

There have been 428 bookings for videos and 27 for DVDs. There were 81 requests for videostreaming from PowerMedia Plus.

The busiest hour is 8-9 AM. Monday and Tuesday are the busiest days.

76% of the orders were placed via the internet.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

October Copy Service

The numbers are in for the copy service for October. 2,503,860 copies were completed in October. It was another busy month.