Dodson School to get tech upgrades

The Dodson School Board recently approved a technology upgrade to improve the school’s antiquated building equipment in order to progress communication, presentations to students, classroom management and overall learning. Dodson School Superintendent Gary Weitz, in his first year at the school, said that parts of technology tools and resources in the classroom are strong – the school has purchased a number of Ipads and Google Chrome books over the last few years – but added that they are nearly worthless if they can’t run correctly. “Our staff can have a thorough understanding on how technology can supplement and enhance what they are doing in the classroom,” he said, “but if those tools don’t respond properly as a result of a band-aided and incomplete infrastructure, it’s frustrating, to say the least.” Superintendent Weitz was approached by Bill Gaffney and Anita Freeman – of Freeman and Gaffney Associates – shortly after arriving at Dodson and the Technology Consulting firm took a look at the the school’s current infrastructure. “Gary realized he needed to get the school’s infrastructure working well for technology to be successful in Dodson,” said Gaffney. “He’s holding off on more devices and instead getting this infrastructure fixed and I think he will see a richer and more effective curriculum and we are leader in helping schools reach that goal.” Gaffney said that Dodson’s current internal network architecture was mostly put in place 15 to 20 years ago and badly needed to be overhauled. At the forefront of items to be replaced are cabling, the switch network, router firewall, web filtering, IP addresses schemes and major upgrades to the school’s wireless system. Gaffney said that the upgrades to the infrastructure will start this week and should be done by the end of April which will allow Dodson’s staff to get familiar with the transition, operating the new system parallel to the old to work the kinks out before the start of the 2016-17 school year. The majority of the work and equipment for the project will be paid for monies secured through the Impact Aid federal grant program. Superintendent Weitz said he is excited that the school will soon be able to use the modern tools on hand in order to meet the needs of the school’s students. “We can now plan our professional development and teaching resources and models in a manner that will allow us to take advantage of the technology that exists today so that we can truly differentiate instruction to meet the needs of every single child,” he said. “The perfection of technology and the evolution of technology in the classroom has enabled public education to do this better than ever before.” Weitz thanked the Dodson School Board for the technology upgrades. "I greatly appreciate the school board listening to the research completed on the state of our building technology infrastructure,” he said. “This decision and investment by our board of directors demonstrates a commitment to a higher educational standard and is one step closer to greater things in teaching and learning here at Dodson now and in the future."