January 9th Update

This was a big week for the technology infrastructure group! We began the week by having a conversation with Flat Toads Consulting. Flat Toads specializes in building school technology infrastructure and educational technology integration. Our talk focused on planning for our meeting with the folks and Cisco and preparing for our conversations. We discussed briefly how we might work with Flat Toads but decided that we should re-group once we learned more about Cisco's offerings and where the school would be located.

On Wednesday Aaron, Leah, Katie and I met with two representatives from Cisco and Greg from the DOE. In addition, the lead of the District Information Technology department called into the meeting. We heard about the type of infrastructure the DOE and Cisco would be able to provide to us. It became clear that they would be helpful in some ways and less helpful in others. We decided to continue our talks with Flat Toads in the hopes that they may be able to guide us through some of the process of getting our technology program up and running. We have scheduled a meeting with the group on Thursday, Jan 29th at 2pm.

We also have a trip scheduled to visit iSchool, which Cisco helped to set up and they are modeling the type of infrastructure the DOE is offering. In addition to iSchool, we have identified some additional schools in the city and one in Philadelphia that we are going to contact and try to set up visits to within the next month.

Our group's next step is to have this meeting on the 29th and put together a timeline of milestones that can guide the progress of the group.