The first round of the DER (Digital Education Revolution) has hit our schools today and is likely to occupy a lot of our attention over the next couple of years. While it is wonderful to see so much money flowing into Education (at last!) there are lots and lots of issues. See Graeme Philipson SMH for a non-schoolie comment.

Our system (Sydney CEO) is opting for the initial round to be used to provide laptops for all the kids in Year 9 (to take home ideally) and is already committed to providing funding to help schools install the infrastructure to put a managed wireless system in place to cater for the increased load.

No doubt I’ll come back to this issue pretty often in the future. Right now I just want to clarify my thinking about just what is required and/or can happen as I am bound to be caught up in a number of discussions soon.

• schools fell into this round of funding if their overall computer/student ratio was less than 1:8 in Year 9-12.
• This first round is expected to lift these school into the 1:2 range so the implication is that they will have to buy machines of some kind.

The issues are all covered in the Q&A on the Govt page .

Some questions:

• staffing to support the presence of the laptops in the school?
• do you have to buy new stuff? can you save money by buying good ex-lease e.g.

I’m starting to get concerned that people are just giving up on myinternet, in terms of development, and simply using the mail and existing classes (a little). The absence of comments in the SINA forums over the last couple of weeks just seems to underline that it simply takes too long!!

I have decided to start putting this stuff here as well as emailing it as it might encourage continued conversation.

Some significant changes:

Some of you will have realised these but I thought it couldn’t hurt to put it in plain English.

• Sydney CEO no longer deals directly with Editure (myinternet) as a client.
• Over recent months Sydney CEO has been integrated into CENet (a much wider network of Catholic schools and dioceses) who are now the negotiators with Editure.
  • This is why the property on the SINA page (the Editure one that has to be opened full view to be read) is explaining all the integration steps.
  • I’m not sure who writes this but I think the person exhorting us to be patient is Bede Ritchie (former Aquinas, Menai .. Worldschool) who is head of CeNet.
  • CEO Helpdesk is still our avenue to complain etc.
  • CEO Sydney doesn’t own the infrastructure any more it is owned by CeNet who have the contract with myinternet.
  • The idea is that it creates a bigger client and supports smaller (country) dioceses.
  • It also explains the “Regional” property that appeared on all the desktops.
• The plus is that we know the problem is with Editure when all the dioceses have the same infrastructure.
• The latency (SLOOOOWNESS) issues is (as was said) within the myinternet database and significant pressure is being put on them worldwide (not showing much so far!)

My notes of Milton’s report at a recent meeting include the following:

• SAS2000 is having significant upgrades to bring in requested aspects, this will probably not be completed until Oct.
• Reporter Pro needs significant rewriting and not much will happen until at least Oct.
• CEO is looking to move into Vista/Office 2007 from June 2008 (at an Office level I think .. but it gives you a guide
• CEO are looking at a structure which can take away the split between the Curric and Admin networks.
• CEO are reviewing all services that are currently provided virus/filtering/email/intranet/content repository/backup.
• No decisions have been made and, as you know, changing CEO policy is a bit like turning the QM2 around!!!

I thought you might like to know!!