Seeing Your Big Picture
A couple of years ago, the Johnson County Public Library just south of Indianapolis was facing frequent bottlenecks in its connectivity—and some very unhappy patrons. As Director Beverly Martin describes it, the library had found itself on the “bleeding edge” of technology. Her county’s population was growing at one of highest rates in the state and, as today’s library is increasingly a virtual service, her library needed help, pronto. Enter ENA. Today, Martin, her staff and patrons are enjoying bandwidth in abundance over its fiber WAN, plus they’re saving money with ENA Connect VoIP telephony and video teleconferencing. In Martin’s words, “with ENA we’ve hit gold.”
Making It Relevant
“Defined STEM has also been a big help. It contains all kinds of STEM curriculum. It has robotics, all types of math curriculum and task-based learning projects. A lot of districts are just kind of doing their own thing in terms of STEM. There is not a lot of direction on what things we need to hit because STEM is created out of what a school system thinks they need. We selected Defined STEM because we wanted something that was uniform and that could offer something at every grade level.”
—STEM Coordinator Jill Pierce, McMinn County Schools, TN
Braving the BYOD Boom
Bring your own device (BYOD) is one of the latest educational initiatives sweeping the nation. You know this. And you probably also know that conceptually, the idea’s brilliant. But in practice (as you also may know all too well) the BYOD phenomenon is leaving a wake of already overwhelmed, stressed-out technology directors in its path. Fortunately, with the right tools—such as ENA’s managed infrastructure and cloud-based tools such as ClassLink LaunchPad—districts can alleviate much of the anxiety that accompanies the implementation of a BYOD program and find more pain-free success.
Building Bridges With ENA Live
“We’re very spread out. We have about 48 miles in between two of our elementary schools. [Our planning] meetings were just taking too many people out of our buildings and taking too much time away. We’d have to get substitute teachers. Our teachers are out of the buildings so much that we thought ENA Live might be a great tool for them to use for their meetings. Now we can have our meetings using videoconferencing and not have to deal with all of that travel.”
—Information Technology Director Tina Key, Crawford County Community School Corporation, IN
