Efficiencies in Technology

This is a great book, its worth reading every line. I loved the embedded video & text, that really shows that the author's believe in technology & like to demonstrate & share their experiences with the society.

This book gives you a different perspective around how Technology can make School Districts more efficient in their operations. Help you save money, be more productive & efficient in your jobs and simplify the day-to-day processes.

Job Well Done by Rob & his team explaining how they handle Identity Management for the school district, how easy it is to add a student through the enrollment process. It is amazing to see the time savings which leads to cost savings.
When you talk about Data Center, few things we overlook is the power & cooling cost...Andover Schools chose VBLOCK as a solution architecture which helped them not only consolidate their server footprint, scale virtual desktop deployment, have single point of support but also help reduce the power and cooling cost by going down from 3 HVAC systems to 1HVAC..That is SIGNIFICANT recurring cost savings, especially when you talk about todays budget scenarios. Choosing cloud based applications to handle their email traffic totally takes away the challenges around archiving & maintaining the email servers.

Today apart from normal challenges, Schools are constantly challenged by Industry Trends: Mobility, Cloud Applications & Collaboration. Am glad to see Andover Schools has taken right steps to keep up to date on technologies and adapting them to better serve their community. It would be interesting to see How Rob & his Team builds up the story by revisiting the book & adding their experience over the period of time, as I consider this as a great source of information to understand how one can better manage the school district with minimum resources.

I would highly recommend every School District in United States to see how Andover Schools have leveraged Technology to their optimum benefit & help deliver the BEST to the community for less.

PLAY Smart to achieve MORE savings with LESS cost of ownership

Keval Shah

BRAVO...BRAVO...This book is a must read for education decision makers "Efficiencies" is about how the Andover Kansas PUblic schools use technologies to make education efficient. The district is one of the best technology districts in the country and make the case for strategic technology use through clear video and text examples." Efficiencies explains how strategically spending on technology allows schools to use scarce resources on things that create quality education. This case study is generalizable and the clearest explanation I have seen for how using technology cost effectively in the back office and classroom cost improves the management and streamlines education delivery. The book provides a great examples from outsourcing xeroxing, to cloud based network centers, to use of google docs. It names products and provides accurate data.

DOWNLOAD THIS FREE BOOK NOW....It helps you think out of the new educational box.
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Messieurs Dickson and Freuting who work in the Andover Kansas Public Schools practice what they preach, they have used the new I book app to produce a book quickly and include videos that make of what they are talking about easy to grasp. They have a midwest down home style on the videos that make the book accessible , understandable and more than a tech manual. The videos showing teachers and students gives a clear message of the reason technology should be used in schools.

The book has two short comings:
1. It may scare off board members and superintendents with use of techno speak that only the IT dudes get. However that does not happen often.
2. The book is misnamed . Calling it "The making of Efficient Schools" not Efficiencies in Technology will give it the attention it deserves.

NOW I WANT TO SEE THE COMPANION BOOK ON THE CURRICULUM SIDE To be CALLED "EFFECTIVE EDUCATION"...HOW THE NEW MEDIA CREATES PERSONALIZED ENGAGING LEARNING AND QUALITY OUTCOMES FOR T AMERICAN SCHOOLS.....I HOPE I DON'T HAVE TO WAIT TOO LONG.

Eliot Levinson
CEO, the BLEGROUP