I work in a school that is quite new. About 5 years old. The school is HUGE, about three time the size of the old building used for the high school but it is already too small for the students that attend. With that said, there are never enough computers to use in the library, there are only 30 working computers. If there are more than one class that needs to use the computers then it is a mad house. As soon as the bell rings and the students arrives in the library its a race to an open computer. Madness!
The classrooms are to be equipped with one teacher computer and a TV and these two should be connected to each other as so to have more teaching options. This good in theory but in my room, the computer is not available on the TV so I am not able to show notes via Word or PowerPoint. The computers do not have sound so I am not able to use any type of video / audio clips in my lessons unless I bring in my own computer to do so.
There are smart boards in use in the school but only in the science department, they were lucky enough to win a grant to pay for their new toys. I know one teacher who uses a mimio but she purchased this with her own funds. There are only four projectors that can be signed out through the library but there are 150 teachers in the building and having one of the four available becomes very difficult.
Each department has apple laptop computers that make me very happy to have but we are still trying to get all of the kinks out so they can be used to benefit the learning process. The IT department are very hard to convince when it comes to out of the box technology ideas (out of their box). Not to worry there, I am wearing them down slowly but surely. This is where all of my non-tenure boat rocking coupons get used up.
So, it sounds like they had great intentions in putting the facility, but kind'a skipped over the details about what should be where and how it should work together. This is pretty much a universal problem where the actual users (teachers and students) are almost never consulted when things are drafted and created. This isn't to say that what IT/admin creates isn't amazing. It's just obvious that they didn't talk to a teacher when they did X. We've had this happen more than a few times in FSO. Our IT friends come to us with their latest version, their new baby, and it is head and shoulders better than anything else out there. Smiles all around. Then someone from our group says,"This is great, what's the status on feature Z we've been asking for?" Awkward. So, yeah, it's a universal disconnect. :-/
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