Rhea Tech Plan 05-08

I. Vision and Goals

Our Rhea County students will be among the top in the state and the nation in academic achievement and technical skill development. To accomplish this, our schools and community will unite as partners in the education process. Our schools will be responsible for providing all students with:

v Challenging learning opportunities through an integrated curriculum

v Hands-on experiences necessary for today’s technically advanced society

v Resources necessary to set realistic career goals

Since education extends far beyond the four walls of the classroom, we see the community’s role as:

v All parents and guardians becoming actively involved in the development of their children’s intellectual growth, citizenship skills, and physical and emotional well-being

v Business industry and government joining together in the teaching and learning process.

v Local government assuring the availability of critical resources to provide our students with a top-quality learning environment.

In this vision, Rhea County will enhance its “Community of Learning” where the focus of education is extended to all community members.

Administration/Faculty Goals

Use technology to identify gaps in student learning and analyze assessment data.
(Paul Riggs, Dallas Smith, Katrina Casteel, Dawn Combs, and all Principals)
Use technology that is developmentally appropriate to promote active learning and individualize
instruction. (Paul Riggs, Dallas Smith, Katrina Casteel, Dawn Combs, and all Principals)
Ensure access to assistive technology for students with disabilities.
(Paul Riggs, Dawn Combs)

Student Goals

The following have been identified a broad overview of K-12 goals.
(Paul Riggs, Dallas Smith, Katrina Casteel, Dawn Combs, and all Principals)

Students will communicate through applications software. Create well-written documents, spreadsheets, and databases. Use computer-assisted design tools.

2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
25% of all students	40% of all students	60% of all students

Students will communicate visually, graphically, and artistically through multi-media
presentations. Use a variety of technology (computers, projection devices, camcorders, video-editing equipment, scanners, calculators, copiers, laser discs, video and audio equipment, cameras).

2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
15% of all students	35% of all students	55% of all students

C. Students will communicate through networks and telecommunications. Use computer networks and telecommunications (electronic mail (Within the District Only), voice mail,video)

2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
10% of all students	25% of all students	40% of all students

D. Students will access and retrieve electronic information. Use search strategies to retrieve information. Use on-site electronic resources (encyclopedias, catalogs, indexes, hand-held learning tools) Use networks to access information (on-line databases, libraries, electronic bulletin boards)

2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
75% of all students	95% of all students	100% of all students

E. Students will interpret and evaluate information to support learning in all content areas.

2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
65% of all students	80% of all students	90% of all students

F. Students will use technology to enhance their productivity. Use technology to develop learning and workplace skills. Develop strategies for problem solving, critical and creative thinking. Create high quality multi-media products. Develop creativity and innovation through the use of technology

2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
50% of all students	70% of all students	90% of all students

G. Students will develop basic technology skills: select and access technology appropriate to needs, use correct starting and exiting procedures, develop keyboarding skills, operate peripheral devices, use technology independently and cooperatively, and use technology safely and ethically.

2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
50% of all students	70% of all students	100% of all students

II. Telecommunications Assessment

The school system will use a variety of means to assess the telecommunication services,

hardware, software, and other services that will be needed to meet our goals.

Internet and WAN traffic will be monitored locally in conjunction with utilization reports provided by the school system’s Internet service provider. Additional bandwidth will be purchased whenever current utilization increases above 50% for extended periods.
Rhea County DOE currently has T-1 lines running to all school locations, and we pay for additional bandwidth upgrades at 4 of our 6 schools. We are currently researching new ways of offering additional bandwidth to all locations, as the current trend toward on-line application delivery is starting to tax our already expanded telecommunications network.
Wireless WAN solutions will be investigated to determine the feasibility of increasing bandwidth among schools for the purpose of providing streaming video and other services from cache and application servers.
E-TOTE, observations, and needs assessments conducted at the schools will help set priorities for the acquisition of further telecommunication services.
Levels of use for both wired and wireless telephone communications will be examined yearly before filing for E-Rate discounts to determine if adjustments need to be made. As Voice-Over-IP and Voice-Over-Ethernet technologies mature, they will be evaluated to see if services can be increased at similar or decreased cost.

III. Promotion of Curricula and Teaching Strategies that Integrate Technology

A description of how the applicant will identify and promote curricula and teaching strategies that integrate technology effectively into curricula and instruction that:

is based on a review of relevant research (http://cnets.iste.org/tssa/view_standards.html)
is aligned to Tennessee Instructional Technology Standards TN has adopted the National Standards for Technology, so by addressing the National Standards, we have met both state and national requirements. All software purchased , both on-line and networked, come fully aligned with the purchase of the product(s). On-line or networked software that is not fully aligned with both state and national standards will not be purchased.
will lead to improvements in student academic achievement All software purchased, both on-line and networked, comes fully aligned.
and includes a timeline for this integration.

Teaching Strategies

§ Presently, every classroom in the Rhea County School System has Internet access, and every teacher has an e-mail account. Every teacher has a personal computer, and every teacher is required to incorporate technology into curriculum delivery. Rhea County currently has over 1400 networked computers within the educational system.

§ Rhea County has also made a huge investment by placing full time, licensed teachers into Lab settings, with the purpose of using Technology to support and supplement the curriculum offerings, while also teaching technical skills. These type labs are called Instructional Labs, while labs designated for teacher sign-up are called Resource Labs.

§ Graysville Elementary has a 24-station Instructional Technology Lab for both Grades K-2 and 3-5, plus a Resource Lab for the entire school

§ Frazier has two 20-station Resource Labs

§ Spring City Elementary has a 30-station K-5 Instructional Lab every student attends once a week, and 30-station 4^th and 5^th Grade Instructional Labs that every student attends weekly

§ Spring City Elementary also has a 20-station Resource Lab for K-5.

§ Rhea Central Elementary has 24-station Instructional Labs for K-2 and 3-5 that students attend weekly, and 30-station Instructional Labs for 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th that students attend daily.

§ Rhea County High School has one Instructional Lab where elective courses are taught; a 30-station Resource Lab; and a 30-station Instructional Lab for Remediation and Resource as needed. In addition, the Library has 12 networked computers that are available for Resource.

§ Spring City Middle School has a 30-station Instructional Lab for 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grades, with every student attending daily, plus a resource lab in the library area.

§ It is also our plan to add new computers each school year to ensure strong hardware in each classroom. (The addition of new computers is based on funding opportunities.)

§ Rhea County plans to use local funds, E-Rate discounts and Title II, Part D funds to improve hardware accessibility to all students and teachers in the district.

§ Rhea County plans to research the possibility of adding distance learning in all our schools which will allow us to offer specialized curricula through the use of technology. When funds become available, these distance learning programs will be added.

§ Leadership is one of our greatest strategies when implementing technology into the curriculum. The Rhea County Schools administrators play an integral role in the effective integration of educational technology. The most effective way administrators can promote technology use is to, themselves be knowledgeable and effective users of technology. Administrators will be expected to follow the Technology Standards for School Administrators developed by the Collaborative for Technology Standards for School Administrators, (to view the complete list of standards, link to http://cnets.iste.org/tssa/view_standards.html ) Administrators will be an advocate in the schools for research-based effective practices in use of technology. They will also support the district technology plan and administer its components in their local schools to achieve the plan’s goals and objectives. Administrators in Rhea County Schools also feel that modeling effective practices and uses of technology are an integral part of technology integration. Administrators will ensure that each staff member has the opportunity to engage in professional development to enhance their classroom instructional procedures.

IV. Professional Development

A description of how the school district will provide ongoing, sustained professional development for all school professionals to further the effective use of educational technology.

Rhea County Schools plans to encourage innovative delivery strategies by…

1. Offering strong, effective on-going staff development for all staff members.

2. Providing quality staff development materials and programs.

3. Sharing the success of outstanding programs on our district websites and in our local news.

4. Providing technical assistance to staff members as they try new and innovative strategies.

5. Providing materials, hardware and software which will empower teachers within their classrooms.

During county wide in-service training, all personnel are advised of the Technology Plan, including teacher and student expectations, with all new employees being given a Technology Orientation session. Rhea County employs a full-time district technology trainer to assist the technology director in being responsible for providing ongoing teacher, administrator, and library media specialist multi-session training in the following areas:

§ Word processing

§ Spreadsheets

§ Databases

§ Mail Merges, and other useful tools

§ Peripherals

§ PowerPoint and PhotoParade

§ PLATO

§ Riverdeep

§ Cornerstone

§ E-mail, including attachments, use of e-mail for classroom projects

§ Basic computer use and maintenance

§ Using electronic student management software

§ Creating desk-top publishing and teacher web pages

§ Locating and integrating online resources such as free web quests, online videos, and

Power Point activities

§ Understanding and recognizing web programming languages

§ Locate and apply for technology integration grants

§ Identify and correlate online lessons with state standards

§ Analyzing state standardized test data

§ Creating student portfolios

§ Creating websites for both students and staff

§ New teachers in Rhea County will be offered additional technology courses.

§ Work with media specialist to interpret and evaluate electronic media.

§ Rhea County designates ALL of our Title IID Funds for Staff Development, allowing every teacher 2 days of “release time” to travel to the local Technology Training Center for classes that are taught by either the Tech Trainer or another specialist in that area.

§ Teacher staff development will focus on Microsoft office products, multimedia production, and student software packages to enhance and engage all learners in the educational process. Teachers and administrators will also have intensive training in Excel, data analysis and interpretation of student data. This training will help to determine the diverse needs of each individual student and provide individualized instruction for each learner. Evaluation of student and teacher technology use will be evaluated by an annual technology report card, Ref. section VI.

§ Rhea County Schools will provide structured on going staff development for teachers and administrators to promote increased student performance and teacher/administrator efficiency. All staff development will be directly correlated to state and national ISTE standards. Staff development will also be structured and designed to meet the school and district improvement plans.

V. Technology Type, Costs, and Infrastructure

Plan provides for a sufficient budget to acquire and support the non-discounted elements of the plan: the hardware, software, professional development, and other services that will be needed to implement the strategies.

Description of the type and costs of technology to be acquired with Ed Tech funds and E-Rate discounts, including interoperability provisions.

Ed Tech and E-Rate funds will be used to purchase both hardware and software for the district. The district will continue to maintain and update standards for educational, personal productivity, and administrative software. The Microsoft Office Professional suite is the district standard for productivity and the Technology Department develops hardware standards every six month so that RCS remains current with the market place. Client software is and will continue to be upgraded to keep pace with evolving Windows standards; server software will parallel this evolution. Hardware upgrades will be a continuing necessity to meet the ever-increasing processor and memory requirements of more demanding client and server software implementations. All software will be maintained at a functional revision level.

Description of how the applicant will coordinate activities funded though the Ed Tech program with technology-related activities supported with funds from other sources.

View Appendix A to see how all programs in Rhea County are used to fund technology-related activities. Ed Tech funded programs are purchased for ALL schools throughout the district as indicated in Appendix A.

Description of the supporting resources, such as services, software, other electronically delivered learning materials, and print resources, that will be acquired to ensure successful and uses of technology.Review sections on Hardware, Software, Staff Development, Curriculum, and Teaching Strategies / Integrated Technology Sections to see how these resources come together to build a strong district-wide technology program.

Hardware and Software

§ Rhea County Schools will continue to provide the hardware and software necessary to reinforce the state and national curriculum standards for each grade and subject area, Pre-K through Adult Education. We will research new technologies as they become available, to further enhance the required curriculum.

§ Rhea County ensures a reasonable price for both hardware and software through the use of competitive bidding. We strive to maintain good relationships with a wide range of hardware and software vendors. These relationships further speed the implementation, and support services of the products.

§ Appendix A gives a complete list of all hardware and software items to be researched and/or launched over the next 3 years.

Costs

View Appendix A to determine supporting cost for each item listed in our plan.

f. Infrastructure

§ Rhea County Schools’ system infrastructure consists of a WAN comprised of 10 interconnected sites. All sites are connected to the Technology Department in a star topology. All 6 schools have at least a T-1 connection to the Technology Department. All routers are maintained by Education Networks of America (ENA). Networking equipment such as managed and unmanaged switches are maintained by the Technology Department.

§ All district level servers are housed at the Central Office. Services offered at the district level include district and school web pages, employee email, DNS, DHCP, firewall, content filtering, student management, staff development management, and educational software. All services provided are managed and supported by the Technology Department.

§ All school level servers are located in designated areas at each school where access by non- approved personnel can be prevented. These servers are used to provide access to courseware, student management software, data storage, and the Internet.

§ All Rhea County Schools servers feature single or dual Intel based processors. Processor classes include P4 Xeon, PIII Xeon, and PII Xeon. All servers utilize RAID 5, Raid 1, or tape backup for data integrity. Operating systems include Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2000 Server, and Novell.

§ Rhea County Schools’ uses Intel based computers using either Windows XP or Windows 98 SE operating systems. These computers feature Intel P4, PIII, and PII processors, contain between 64 and 256 MB of RAM, contain between 40 and 120GB hard drives, and offer at least 100MB Ethernet connectivity to the schools local area network.

§ Each school is wired to offer at least one 100MB Ethernet connection per classroom and office. This provides adequate bandwidth inside each school for accessing the services provided by each school server.

§ View Appendix D for a complete list of all curriculum software in the district.

VI. Evaluation, Data, and Accountability

Description of an evaluation process that enables the district/schools to monitor progress toward the specified goals and make mid-course corrections in response to new developments and opportunities as they arise.

Rhea County Schools is currently using software that allows us to determine student progress linked to our state required curriculum. We are currently using Plato, Cornerstone, Orchard, and RiverDeep depending on the grade level of the student along with a number of other academic support software as listed in Appendix D.

A description of the process the school district will use to monitor progress and to evaluate the effectiveness of the funded activities in; integrating technology into the classrooms, increasing the effectiveness of teachers, and enabling students to reach challenging State academic standards.

Data

§ Each Rhea County School completes the E-Tote survey annually to help determine progress and areas of concern.

§ Administrators, teachers, and students will complete an online, self-evaluation rubric based on the Mankato Scale, developed by Makato (Minnesota) Public Schools and adapted by Bellingham (Washington) Public Schools. The results will be used to plan further district in-services and school-wide professional development activities. See Appendix F, pp. 28-31 for a sample copy, and also for tabulated results over a 3 year period.

§ Elementary schools use the Star Reading and Star Math applications to regularly assess students’ progress in general curriculum areas. Teachers make use of Star reports in planning lessons and arranging course material.

§ Perfect Copy software is utilized by Rhea County High School to evaluate students’ ability as it relates to Tennessee’s Writing Assessment. Groups of laptop computers are deployed as mobile computer labs with wireless networking capabilities to increase the accessibility of these testing products.

§ The Technology Department will continue to evaluate our total program each month and inform all employees by way of the website and by e-mail.

VII. Parental Involvement

A description of how technology will be used to promote parental involvement and increase communication with parents, including a description of how parents will be informed of the technology used so parents can reinforce at home the instruction received at school.

Technology will continue to be used to communicate with parents and the community at large by using the following tools… Websites and e-mail will both be used at the school and district level, desktop published newsletters, news articles, handouts, parent nights where technology is the center piece of the meeting, student produced e-books and projects, student e-mail, and planned parent meetings where e-mail is used to invite and remind parents to attend.

VIII. Collaboration with Adult Literacy Service

§ Rhea County Technology Staff plans to work with Adult Basic Education in an effort to help maintain their equipment and assist with the loading and training of all software titles.

§ The Rhea County Technology Staff plans to help and support our Family Resource Centers throughout the school year and with all summer programs.

§ The Rhea County Technology Staff plans to assist Adult Basic Education and our Federal Projects Director in the administration of the federally required Para-Pro testing, which will be taken on-line.

IX. School Safety and Technology

The Technology Department will develop partnerships with our School Safety Coordinator and develop district-wide standards for security networks to be used in every school.

Currently we have surveillance and/or security networks at four of the six schools. As funds are available we will add surveillance, support staff in its use.

X. Technology Staff

The Rhea County Department of Education Technology Staff consists of the following positions:

Paul Riggs	Technology Coordinator
Dawn Combs	Training Coordinator/Grant Writer
Wayne Simmons	Network Engineer/Technician
Adam Dyer	Network Engineer/Technician
Dallas Hicks	Network Engineer/Technician/Webmaster
Tim Jones	System Software and Media Specialist

XI. Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Compliance

§ Rhea County Schools has an Acceptable Use Policy of technology and the Internet policy for students and teachers. Rhea County Schools also provides local blocking and filtering of Internet sites. Software to monitor e-mail for viruses has been implemented and the Technology Department will continue to support this software. Rhea County Schools is in compliance with the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA).

§ Children’s Internet Protection Act in RCS is monitored and enforced throughout the entire district. E-rate form 479 has been filed with the SLD and filtering and monitoring software is used and monitored each day by the Technology Department Staff.

§ See Appendix C.