Construction management processes

Houston Independent School District (HISD) has selected Prolog software to standardize its construction management processes. HISD is working directly with Project 3 Technologies, a Meridian Systems Value Added Reseller (VAR), to implement Prolog Manager across the school district’s current US$1.045 billion capital improvement program. (Willie Burroughs, general manager, HISD.)

Fashion college boosts business intelligence

The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM), a private college dedicated to educating students for careers in fashion, graphics, interior design and entertainment industries, has chosen the Smart i Appliance—powered by Talend Integration Suite’s Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool—to boost its business intelligence (BI) capabilities. The Smart i Appliance, a collaboration between Talend, Key Information Systems, Systech Solutions and IBM, is a plug-and-play BI appliance based on IBM’s System i (AS/400) platform. Under the terms of the agreement, FIDM uses Talend’s transformation components—such as mapping, normalizing, sorting and aggregating—to cleanse, transform and load data into a new data warehouse. (Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, chief information officer, FIDM.)

Campbell Union High School District to save $0.25m pa

Campbell Union High School District, located in Silicon Valley, has deployed Citrix XenDesktop™ with HDX™ technology for more than 8,000 students and faculty beginning with the 2009-2010 school year. The school district will improve security, simplify desktop management and realize an estimated savings of $250,000 each year compared to standard desktop purchasing – with additional savings expected as their desktop virtualization project continues to expand.

Serving more than 7,600 students across seven campuses, Campbell Union High School District first explored desktop virtualization as a way to help bring down skyrocketing hardware and IT management costs. The district’s IT team serves the computing needs of all students, as well as 650 employees and faculty members. In addition to personal PCs for staff members and student laptops in each classroom, each campus also provides multiple computer labs for instruction and student use. The maintenance, security, upkeep and refresh cycle for all those PCs and laptops was placing a real strain on the district’s budget. Desktop virtualization dramatically simplifies this process, allowing IT to manage all desktops from a central location while delivering a rich, personalized experience to each user, regardless of their location or the device they are using. (Charles Kanavel, director of technology for Campbell Union High School District.)

One-to-Watch: SUMS Online will soon arrive in the US with a web site at www.sumsmath.com.

Parental notification system

As part of its commitment to enhance collaborative communication between school administrators and parents, the Archdiocese of Washington has elected to equip all 61 of its elementary schools with the automated telephone and Internet-based parental notification system developed by SchoolReach. Used by over 4,200 schools in 49 states, SchoolReach provides emergency notification and general school-to-home communications solutions to public and private schools. (Kelly Branaman, assistant superintendent.)

University Medical Center selects Lawson

Oklahoma State University Medical Center has selected the Lawson S3 Enterprise Financial Management and Supply Chain Management suites. These software suites will help the healthcare provider automate its business and supply inventory processes and improve efficiencies – all geared toward helping the organization reduce operating costs. (Craig McKnight, chief financial officer for Oklahoma State University Medical Center.)

Emergency buttons for school buses

Charlotte County Public Schools (CCPS) based in Port Charlotte, Florida has standardized on GPS-driven applications from Everyday Solutions. EveryPoint and an emergency button will be installed on 132 buses at CCPS. In the event of an emergency, the driver can press the emergency button and an alert, including the precise bus location, will be sent via email and text message to school officials. EveryPoint will also supply CCPS with real-time and historical data that can be presented in reports and on maps of the district to monitor activities such as excessive speeding, engine idling and fleet performance. (Richard Duckworth, Transportation Director at CCPS.)

School district spends $1.7 million

Mansfield Independent School District (MISD) has invested $1.7 million in the Fast ForWord family of products from Scientific Learning to help the district’s struggling readers and boost the performance of students already at grade level reading proficiency. Designed to accelerate learning by developing the student brain to process more efficiently, the Fast ForWord educational software was purchased this spring will be used this school year by elementary, intermediate, middle and high school students within Mansfield’s 37 schools. (Dr. Bob Morrison, MISD superintendent.)

School District buys ERP

Cherry Creek School District No. 5 has signed a multi-suite contract that includes the Lawson S3 Enterprise Financial Management and Supply Chain Management suites as well as the Lawson Human Resource Management suite. The new system will help the district automate manual processes, such as budgeting, purchasing and personnel transactions. Lawson Teacher Contract Administration will help the district manage complex tracking and reporting requirements associated with teacher pay to help ensure accurate payroll, benefits, time and taxation processes tied to teacher contracts. (Lyndal Brookhart, director of Human Resources for Cherry Creek School District.)

Hawaii community solution to youth programs

The State of Hawaii has awarded nFocus Software a contract to deploy its community solution to youth programs. nFocus Software will implement a data collection and information management system this summer in the Hawaii Department of Defense’s About Face program, which provides positive youth development outreach to at-risk youth. The About Face program provides services to over a thousand young people in 25 sites throughout Hawaii. As the chosen community solution, nFocus Software’s TraxSolutions participant management software will allow the About Face program to standardize and centralize data collection from multiple service providers. (Wayne Kanemoto, Hawaii’s project officer for the State of Hawaii Department of Defense.)

$1.3 million on education communication network

INX Inc has been awarded a $1.3 million contract by The State of New Mexico’s Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) to implement an education communication network. The project will improve remote access to educational resources and connectivity to other educational entities. INX will design, implement, and maintain the communication network. (Jean Rightley, Superintendent of Education at CYFD.)

Registration & outcome student assessment system

St. Louis Public Schools has selected nFocus Software to provide the school district with a registration and outcome based student assessment system for its Community Education Program. nFocus Software will provide St. Louis Public Schools with the ability to assess, improve, and secure additional funding for its community programs and activities. (Peg Pedersen, St. Louis Community Education Supervisor.)

Strategic Academic Enterprise

Hudson County Community College (HCCC) has selected Datatel Colleague SQL Server to provide an end-to-end solution that manages its complete student lifecycle. The software will enable HCCC to build a Strategic Academic Enterprise that drives student achievement and institutional success. Colleague will replace an IA Plus software system from SunGard Higher Education. (HCCC Board of Trustees Chair William J. Netchert.)

St. Louis School District

Hazelwood School District, near St. Louis, Missouri, has purchased Carnegie Learning Bridge to Algebra textbooks and software for 900 ninth grade students in the District’s three high schools. “Our goal is to graduate each of our students prepared to compete professionally or in continuing education,” said Cathy French, Math Coordinator for Hazelwood School District.

University finance and human resource functions

St. Lawrence University (SLU) has selected Datatel Colleague to create a Strategic Academic Enterprise that will integrate its finance and human resource functions into a Web-based, campus-wide information management solution. The University has also licensed Datatel’s ActiveCampus Portal and the company’s DataOrchestrator ODS reporting solution. http://www.datatel.com.

Pay for parking by 'phone

Verrus Mobile Technologies, Inc. has implemented its Pay by Phone parking service in Sacramento, CA, Ann Arbor, MI and at Texas Tech University. www.verrus.com.

Parent notification services

SchoolReach, provider of parent notification services used by public, private and parochial schools, has entered into a partnership agreement with the Minnesota Association of School Administrators (MASA). Through this alliance, the SchoolReach system will be made available to MASA member schools at a discount. A state-chartered association of the American Association of School Administrators, MASA is the leading advocacy organization for school administrators in the state of Minnesota. With its three-step ‘Record-Select-Send’ instant messaging process, SchoolReach allows administrators to record a brief message, select a specific list of parents, teachers, district staff, or community members to whom the message can be sent, and deliver those messages simultaneously via voice, e-mail, or text messaging. (Dr. Charles Kyte, executive director of MASA.)

When the children get home to their PC, Spysure can help protect children from paedophiles and blocks adult content. In the office it monitors and views employees' activities and tells you what is happening online. http://www.spysure.com

Protecting young PC users

Web filtering vendor SmoothWall (www.smoothwall.com) has launched a filtering offer for schools. In the last couple of months, the company has installed over 10,000 licenses for Guardian in K12 schools in New York State alone. The standard version of Guardian is a perimeter or gateway-based web filtering device, designed to control internet use within the school network. But with laptop numbers rising rapidly in schools, there is an increasing requirement to extend web filtering beyond the school gates to protect and ensure the same safe-surfing experience for laptop users too. Mobile Guardian is designed to enforce filtering regardless of location, with laptop browsing logs automatically uploaded as soon as users return to the network.

Dell says a growing commitment among U.S. educators, policymakers and parents to invest in technology that enhances the learning environment is driving the early success of its Latitude 2100 netbook designed for students. More than 500 U.S. school districts have purchased the Latitude 2100, launched last month. According to Dell, the ARRA and an increasing appreciation among education stakeholders for the impact technology has on learning will help modernize U.S. classrooms and transform the country’s education system. Netbook or “mininotebook” shipments are expected to have a five–year growth rate of 60.1% from 2008 to 2013, according to research firm IDC.

Parents will be interested in Spysure, a PC product that helps protect children from paedophiles and blocks adult content. In the office it monitors and views employees' activities and tells you what is happening online. http://www.spysure.com

Four Universities join program

California State University, Sacramento, the University of Rhode Island, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Virginia Tech have joined Unicon's Cooperative Support Program for the open source Sakai, uPortal, and/or CAS (Centralized Authentication Service) platforms. The Sakai software is a community source effort to develop a platform for innovation in collaboration, teaching and learning, and research support software.

1.23 million messages at school

Glen Ridge Public Schools, a K-12 public school system, has selected MXsense’sWeb-based email archiving solution to manage and archive school-wide emails, meet regulatory requirements and provide the ability to easily search through email messages. As a measure of success, the school system is already storing 80GB spanning 1.23 million messages. Regulations such as the Department of Education’s Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (34 CFR Part 99) are driving the need for school districts such as Glen Ridge to effectively archive their email communications. (Winnie Boswell, Director of Technology at Glen Ridge Public Schools.)

At home Spysure helps protect children from paedophiles and blocks adult content. In the office it monitors and views employees' activities and tells you what is happening online. http://www.spysure.com

$750,000 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research

UQM Technologies, a developer of alternative energy technologies, has received orders from military customers totaling $2.77 million for propulsion systems, generators and funded engineering activities. The most recent order is a $750,000 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract from the U.S. Navy to develop a high torque electro-magnetic actuator system. The focus of this two-year effort will be to improve the torque capability of electric motors through the use of advanced materials research and the company’s proprietary magnet architecture. The Company will also collaborate with the University of Texas to develop an advanced gearbox as part of the development effort.