June Quarterly Report

Our migration efforts continue. A number of significant events have occurred so far this year.

• •In November of 1996, we were able to move all PPS users off the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon modem pool and onto the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) modem pool. The PPS modem pool consists of eighty phone lines. Twenty-four phone lines were purchased through CK:P and are available seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Fifty-six lines, that during work-hours are used by the PPS Purchasing Department, are available for home access by PPS staff. Both sets of lines, routers and modems are maintained by PPS technical staff.

• •In June, we migrated approximately four thousand staff accounts on the CK:P accounts-server to a PPS server. This was another milestone in our efforts to migrate project activities to the Pittsburgh Public Schools. CK:P education staff provides user support and PPS technical staff maintains the new accounts server.
• •During July and August the Pittsburgh Supercomputing (PSC) and PPS staff will finish migrating all connectivity from PSC to the Pittsburgh Public Schools. PPS staff will then maintain and support all connectivity for existing and new CK:P sites.

Users

The demand for Internet access has grown consistently over the four years of the project. Besides the Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh (CK:P) central servers there are twenty school servers at CK:P sites and a number of servers at non-CK:P schools that provide student email accounts. As of June 1997, there are:

• •3,000 staff accounts (approximately 60% participation),
• •1,500 student accounts (14 school sites), and
• •2/3 of all remaining Pittsburgh Public Schools, approximately 70 schools, have Internet access through their libraries.

1996 Sites

We were able to supply the six sites identified in the 1996 school year with servers, routers and user devices. This has been a long process, because of purchasing delays on the PPS side.

As of June of 1997, we have twenty CK:P sites in full operation.

New Sites for 1997

In April nine new school-sites were selected through an RFP process. The new sites are: Chatham Elementary, Colfax Elementary, Friendship Elementary, Lemington Elementary, Linden Elementary, Martin Luther King Elementary, Miller Elementary, Morningside Elementary, and South Vocational High School.

Preliminary wiring diagrams have been created and the CK:P Education staff has begun to meet with these new sites-teams to plan for implementation as of September of 1997.

By the end of the calendar year - 1997 - CK:P will have fulfilled its commitment of twenty-nine sites - fifteen elementary schools, four middle schools and ten high schools.

Teacher Training

As part of our ongoing efforts at staff development, we offered a follow-up to the 1996 Fall CK:P Institute. For three weeks after schools closed - June 18 to July 2 - the CK:P Education staff offered a set of Internet classes. Similar to the Fall Institute, all classes were filled. Approximately four hundred PPS staff attended the Summer Institute on their own time.

Documentation

In preparing to handover the project to the PPS, the Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh staff is spending July completing a set of documents that can be handed over to the PPS tech staff as help documentation.

PPS Tech Plan

At its April legislative meeting the PPS Directors passed a 25 million dollar Technology Plan. The Technology Plan in addition to rolling out technology to all PPS schools, will maintain and support the infrastructure created by CK:P.

CK:P Education staff helped to co-author the District's Technology plan.

Dissemination

Using the Internet to Conquer Your Fears of Technology: Lessons Learned from Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh

Using Instructional Technology as a Catalyst for School Reform

Our dissemination efforts continue. CK:P Education staff presented at the 1997 American Educational Research Association Conference.

Also, CK:P Education staff were part of the Plenary Panel at Internet 1997. At both conferences CK:P staff reported on our experience with implementing wide-area-technologies in an urban school district.

Our presentations have expanded to the broader topic of the role of technology, specifically wide-area-networks in school reform efforts.

System Administrator

In January we lost our system administrator. We spent the next five months advertising for the position with no avail. In late May, we made a decision to fill the position internally, (within PPS) and to train that person to be the new system administrator. This is our first attempt at solving our technical staffing problems by bringing aboard a problem solver with a good employee record and training them in the field we need.

This person will continue the CK:P research effort by looking into the Windows NT server platform.

CK:P Featured in Information Renaissance Conference

CK:P school sites were part of the Information Renaissance and NSF Conference - Balancing Research and Production - in early April. Conference attendees visited many CK:P schools as examples of mature Internet sites where students and teachers were using the Internet in classroom.

Technical