John Baronian, Edison Schools Introduction

Hi Plone-Educational List Members,

I'm John Baronian and I work for Edison Schools, a private manager of
public schools and I work as the Web Services Manager in their New York
headquarters office.  Edison Schools has roughly 150 schools in 20
states. We  manage charter and contract schools and a couple of entire
school districts, which translates to around 110,000 students about 70%
of whom are on free or reduced lunch.

 The typical edison school has 1 to 2 labs of 30 computers, 3 computers
in the back of the classroom, each teacher has a laptop and every family
of students in grades 3 and above can take home a computer with access
to dial in to their school's network.  20% of our schools are Mac
platform and the rest are IBM PCs 600 mhz pIIIs or better.  And the
bummer I am faced with is that we are standardized on Netscape 4.7x.

I have worked with Edison schools for 3 years, first in Technology
Integration (teaching teachers to use technology) and recently as a
result of restructuring, managing our intranet for staff and students.
I am in the process of moving the intranet from a Netscape Enterprise
over to Zope and in the past few months I've been looking to move
different aspects of the intranet into Plone.

I think it would be interesting to look at how here in the US we could
look at aspects of NCLB (the No Child Left Behind bill) and see how
using Plone might help address certain compliance issues.

Along those lines I've been contemplating:

1) Concept of the whole intranet be moved to Plone... and getting the
browser standard changed to

2) content type for Lesson Plan(s) -- those lesson plans could be
submitted by teachers evaluated by curriculum specialists ( attributed
to the proper State and National standards and objectives and/or the
local school's pedagogical scope and sequence) and reviewed by
principals and other administrators through a workflow approval process
for NCLB compliance.  Then those lesson plans could then be refined/ and
cataloged for use by the community at large.

3) Out of the box Plone is great for something along the lines of
setting up curriculum specific Topics for at a glance view of by the the
community of approved links or approved documents.  These too with
proper planning could be pegged to state/local specific Standards and
Objectives.

There are 2^n th more things I want to work out with Plone but there is
my situation and I promise to be more brief in the future....

I look forward to participating with the group.

Best wishes,

John B.




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