New US Edugeek Users - Introduce yourself here :)

[vikpaw]

Hello all,

 

I just stumbled on to this site tonight. I would like to say thank you for an incredible site.

 

I am the one and only tech guy in a small school of 200 students in western kansas. Looking forward to rubbing shoulders with other school tech personel.

 

Dave

 

glad you like the site. look forward to seeing your around the forums and collaborating on any problems.

[jzepeda]

Hello all,

 

I just stumbled on to this site tonight. I would like to say thank you for an incredible site.

 

I am the one and only tech guy in a small school of 200 students in western kansas. Looking forward to rubbing shoulders with other school tech personel.

 

Dave

 

Welcome!

[Mako]

Welcome to the bright new faces.

 

Have a seat and a hobnob... oh wait, still out of those...

[TheITCrowd]

Hi,

 

I work for school district in PA doing help desk.

 

Gareth, I've always wanted to work in the UK, doing IT :-)

Edited January 28, 2010 by TheITCrowd
gramatical mistake

[witch]

Welcome to all

I've always wanted to go to look at some schools in the US (hint!)

Do you think my bosses would pay for a 'fact-finding mission'???

Anyone else wanna come?

[garethEds]

Hi,

 

I work for school district in PA doing help desk.

 

Gareth, I've always wanted to work in the UK, doing IT :-)

 

Fancy a job swap? LOL.

 

GJE

[STLCC_Max]

Hello, Max here from St. Louis MO checking in.

 

Currently a Computer Services Tech on a campus of a 4 campus Community College District. Came to this job after being a Computer Operator for several years with the same district at our administration site. Was a reallocated resource due to some staff restructuring but it was a direction I was wanting to go. Something I have always said is that I have worked on everything from the mainframe to the desktop. Always looking to expand my knowledge on those systems and any that I might not have touched.

 

Max...

[Dos_Box]

Hi Max, and welcome

[TheITCrowd]

Fancy a job swap? LOL.

 

GJE

 

I'm seriously thinking about it haha, or we at least could do rotations or "exchange a tech program" :-)

[TheITCrowd]

if you come to philly area, I'll take you guys around my school district and we can go get the world famous philly cheesesteaks. My goodness, just taking about one makes me want to get one right now from south philly

[russdev]

Nar Gareth if go over then you have to live with shame of having to become a Philly fan

 

Must admit if won lottery I would like to fo a 'fact finding mission' in usa as to say.

 

Russ

[iadubber]

Hello,

I'm glad I found this place, so I'm not the only one who has to deal with the k-12 lack of funding computer environment!

 

I've been with an 11,000 student 1,400 teacher school district in Iowa since 2005.

[Dos_Box]

Welcome and just out of interest, how many computers does your district have and how many staff do you work with to support them? I know it varies from district to district but it's always nice to get current figures.

[iadubber]

Welcome and just out of interest, how many computers does your district have and how many staff do you work with to support them? I know it varies from district to district but it's always nice to get current figures.

 

Currently we hover around 5,000 computers and devices in 21 buildings (19 schools) throughout the city. I do the majority of the schools (10) and I'm the webmaster. Then there are 4 other staff that roam about the rest of the school district. We are JUST moving from an NT auth network environment to AD w2k3. We contracted Dell to do the migration over to AD and to upgrade our servers. We also purchased the KACE system so that will be implemented this summer. Also, we signed an agreement last month also with Dell for a 950 laptop leasing deal. This agreement will allow us to hire an additional person, although the RFP for the lease states that we don't need to fix any hardware issues as a department. We can just send them in and we'll get a replacement. We all know how that goes. My guess is we'll end up working on them.

 

Our department is broken down into this:

 

1 Director of Tech

1 Network Admin

1 Asst. Network Admin

1 Phones/AS400 person

3 SIMS/Powerschool people

1 Helpdesk phone position

1 Lead PC Support position

4 PC Support Pos (soon to be 5 July 1st)

[Dos_Box]

We are JUST moving from an NT auth network environment to AD w2k3

 

I have to be frank here, but that is shocking!! Mainstream support for Server 2k3 ended last summer, however, if it is the only upgrade path you have from NT then I suppose it will make a good stepping stone to 2008. I think I was more shocked by the use of NT more than anything. Saying that, we do have a couple of Win 98 fans lurking around here

[iadubber]

I have to be frank here, but that is shocking!! Mainstream support for Server 2k3 ended last summer, however, if it is the only upgrade path you have from NT then I suppose it will make a good stepping stone to 2008. I think I was more shocked by the use of NT more than anything. Saying that, we do have a couple of Win 98 fans lurking around here

 

We no longer used any NT computers as of last school year, but for whatever reason the Network admins stuck with the NT domain authentication throughout the years. Don't ask me why, that's not my department. Forever we had a sup. that didn't want to stick money into technology. We got a new sup. two years ago and she's put an emphasis on 21st century learning and upgrading technology. So we are trying to play the catchup game from 10 years behind.

 

edit: I'm not sure the reasoning behind moving to 2k3 over 2k8.

Edited May 5, 2011 by iadubber

[Dos_Box]

It's a shame that in many areas, even here in the UK, there is in some areas a lack of understanding of the importance in IT in not only learning but the lives that the pupils themselves lead. When you have kids using technology several generations on from that of the schools then you know its time to upgrade!

[vikpaw]

comrades

 

Currently we hover around 5,000 computers and devices in 21 buildings (19 schools) throughout the city. I do the majority of the schools (10) and I'm the webmaster. Then there are 4 other staff that roam about the rest of the school district. We are JUST moving from an NT auth network environment to AD w2k3. We contracted Dell to do the migration over to AD and to upgrade our servers. We also purchased the KACE system so that will be implemented this summer. Also, we signed an agreement last month also with Dell for a 950 laptop leasing deal. This agreement will allow us to hire an additional person, although the RFP for the lease states that we don't need to fix any hardware issues as a department. We can just send them in and we'll get a replacement. We all know how that goes. My guess is we'll end up working on them.

 

Our department is broken down into this:

 

1 Director of Tech

1 Network Admin

1 Asst. Network Admin

1 Phones/AS400 person

3 SIMS/Powerschool people

1 Helpdesk phone position

1 Lead PC Support position

4 PC Support Pos (soon to be 5 July 1st)

 

That's an impressive array of support, still less than one per school though! Where are you in the hierarchy?

Impressed to see SIMS, though i reckon it's a generic MIS, not the actual SIMS™ that we know and love - Any info you can post in the US MIS forum would be useful.

 

See you around

[Bosox-Fan]

Hi .... George here, IT Project Manager in Greater Boston. (Financial Services)...SCCM Win7 deployment for laptops is my current challenge.....

[elsiegee40]

Hello and welcome to edugeek!

[TheITCrowd]

Hi .... George here, IT Project Manager in Greater Boston. (Financial Services)...SCCM Win7 deployment for laptops is my current challenge.....

 

Hi George, you know what I saw the other day ... one of ESPN's 30 for 30 films about Red Sox's comeback against those darn yankees in 2004 ... awesome ... but anyway ... have you tried MDT 2010 for deploying windows 7? Just thinking aloud

[Pookah]

Hi everyone!

 

I've been out of the I.T. World since 2003. Being a single full time father of a three year old daughter, i got back into the game and am facinated at the advances in technology!

[elsiegee40]

Hello and welcome to edugeek

[vikpaw]

@Pookah

[LoganA]

Hello all

 

My name is Logan, from Lawrence, MA

I help manage 19 schools and a main office

 

Dos_Box, our department has

1 Director of Information Systems & Technology

1 IS&T Manager (aka PowerSchool SIMS support person 1st / AS/400 support person 2nd / Help Desk 3rd)

1 Help Desk Manager

1 AS/400 Programmer (aka AS/400 support 1st / PowerSchool SIMS support person 2nd / Help Desk 3rd)

1 Senior Technician (Help Desk ditto)

2 Senior Network Analyst (one of them is me, we also do Technician and Help Desk roles)

2 Technician (for onsite support at our High School campus, they have their own help desk voice mail box/email box)

 

Technology Breakdown:

4608 desktops, 31 Different models, mostly XP, moving to Windows 7 for computer labs first,

71 Servers, 9 Different models

Network Switches: Cisco and some HP switches

Wifi gear: Cisco WiFi controller for the High School, WAP610N (1st wave of APs for the other schools), and WAP4410N-A (2nd wave of APs) all connect to a RADIUS server or two

Web filtering: Smoothwall Express, with my own customizations to pull custom whitelist and blacklist from one location

Spam filtering: Sophos Email Appliance

E-mail: Exchange 2010, was Lotus Notes 6.5 a month ago

Databases: Everything? MySql, Oracle, mix of MS SQL Server versions

Anti-Virus: Sophos, moving to Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (since a month ago, notice a pattern?)

Backup: Internet Vault Classic, for both on-site and off-site backups

Desktop Management: SCCM2012, Deep Freeze on Students XP computers, Ghost, and a hard drive duplication box.