Llano school board gets technology update

BY SETH GREEN • Daily Tribune Staff

LLANO - Despite Llano’s public image as the sleepy rural town of days gone by, the Llano Independent School District is working to put students on the cutting edge of information technology.

“I think when you start to integrate tecnhology into what you’re doing, if your computers go down or your phones go down, you go home,” LISD Technology Director Jim Beasley said at Monday’s meeting of the LISD school board. “Well, education has kind of gotten to that point, too.”

Beasley made his annual technology presentation to the school board to apprise them of his progress in integrating the district’s computer and network systems, both for students and for staff.

“I believe it’s really important, because if we’re going to ask teachers to use this stuff, it needs to work,” he said.

Beasley began by explaining the goals he set for his department, including 99-percent uptime for all systems, fastest possible interconnection speeds, better tools for managing how and when technology is used in the classroom and round-the-clock access for students and teachers.

And he has been busy upgrading the district’s computers during the past year.

Last year, Beasley said, the district had 350 computers more than five years old, with a quarter of the machines running on Windows 2000. Today, he said, all the district’s computers are less than three years old and all run Windows XP.

Also in the past year, Beasley said, the district has installed interactive learning tools in 42 classrooms, with another 11 on the way this year, Beasley said. He has also updated the district’s Web site, which will soon allow teachers to create their own Web pages.

Other planned upgrades include allowing each campus to maintain its own Web site and repairs to the district’s fiber-optic cable network.

Since last year, Beasley said, the district has advanced from a paper-based attendance system to electronic grade books and attendance. Soon, he said, the Web site will have the capacity to allow parents to link to the grade book system to see how their children are performing.

Electronic surveillance systems across the district have also improved over the past year, Beasley said. A year ago, most of the surveillance cameras at Llano High School were broken, and the digital video surveillance system at Llano Junior High School was inadequate, he said.

But now, the district is working on installing a new digital video surveillance system at LHS, and technicians will soon install a similar system at LJHS.

Beasley also said the district had purchased two machines designed to manage bandwidth in the district. Without the machines, he said, the network distributed bandwidth on a first-come, first-served basis. That meant one person could consume all the district’s bandwidth at one time.

The new hardware allows the network to equally distribute bandwidth between users as they go online.

All that glitters is not computers, however, and Beasley said he would shift his attention to replacing the district’s aging telephone system. He also hopes to get printers for classrooms and to make more additions to the Web site.

seth@thepicayune.com

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Llano school board gets technology update