Fresno Unified School District

Student-Centered Technologies Enhance the Learning and Teaching Experience

Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) covers a large urban area around the city of Fresno, in central California. FUSD needed to replace its aging IT infrastructure to support effective communication across the school district and to foster student-centered learning. FUSD partnered with Microsoft to enhance classroom technologies, including an initial deployment of 1,000 ultra-mobile personal computers with server-based technologies such as personalized student digital portfolio Web pages. FUSD saved money by standardizing its server infrastructure on productivity and security technologies found within the Microsoft® School Agreement, which includes the Enterprise Client Access License Suite Agreement. Despite continued budgetary limitations, FUSD’s Microsoft technologies provide a long-term foundation for enhancing the teaching and learning experience within all 105 FUSD schools.

 

Situation

The fourth largest school district in California, Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) serves a diverse population of more than 75,000 students within the city of Fresno. Over the last five years, the student population has represented more than 75 different languages and cultures. FUSD has 105 schools in urban neighborhoods of varied socio-economic backgrounds; however, 82 percent of these students come from low-income families.

Microsoft provides all the technologies we need in a single, cost-effective platform to help us prepare students for the digital literacy requirements of the twenty-first century. Kurt Madden Chief Technology Officer, Fresno Unified School District

For the past decade, FUSD has struggled to maintain a high standard of education across a large district that is challenged by state budget cuts and fiscal restraint. Over time, the school district found itself unable to consistently invest in upgrading its education technology across all schools due to annual budget uncertainties. Patti Patrick, now District Instruction Technology Coordinator at FUSD, began teaching in Fresno 22 years ago. She recalls: “There was no centralized, coordinated plan for buying and using technology across the district. We purchased small numbers of licenses or products at a time, and depending on the ability of different staffs to write grants or do fundraising, schools had varying levels of computer services available to students. Teachers were frustrated about the inconsistency in technology available to the students. And across the district, staffs wanted to collaborate electronically on lesson plans so we could share best practices.”

FUSD had been running an old version of the Novell Netware operating system to support file and print services and provided only an outdated GroupWise e-mail solution, which did not offer shared calendaring. The schools had T1 telecommunication lines that were too slow to be of any value in the classroom. FUSD desktop computers were six years old on average, and they were running a variety of outdated, incompatible software. Also, FUSD IT staffers wasted time contending with an unacceptably high number of security breaches within the student information system for middle and high schools.

After joining FUSD in 2006 as Chief Technology Officer, Kurt Madden began working with Superintendent Michael Hanson to revitalize the impact of education technology in the district. By then, FUSD’s financial situation had recovered to the extent that Hanson and Madden could envision deploying a suite of integrated technologies to optimize staff productivity and support a new way of teaching, learning, and working across the district. “Our superintendent and chief financial officer had both done an outstanding job of pulling us out of our financial troubles,” Madden says. “I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to help the district make some real strides forward in technology for the classroom. Our first goal was to put in place a technology infrastructure to help our teachers produce career-ready graduates.”

The superintendent and other executive staff wanted FUSD to move away from the old paradigm of learning, where teachers spend all day standing at the front of the class and instructing students, to a more fluid classroom experience where the teacher is able to move around the room, coaching individuals at their desks.

“We believe that student-centered learning, with the teacher guiding individuals to their best levels of achievement, is optimal,” says Madden. “For this to occur, you need technology integrated within the classroom so that it doesn’t interrupt the learning process. Instead, we had been forcing our students to leave the classroom and spend 50 minutes at a computer lab. Or we asked a few of them to get up from their desks and work at older machines lined up against the classroom wall.”

The IT leadership also turned their attention to optimizing the productivity of teaching staffs outside the classroom and to improving administrative efficiency across the different departments within the district, including IT. They saw that without a real communication and collaboration infrastructure to share best practices among teachers and staff in all departments and in all schools, no fundamental improvements in teaching efficiency and education outcomes could be achieved.

Gradually, Madden and Hanson worked out a set of criteria for defining and acquiring the best technology to support the district’s long-term goals for practicing innovative teaching and reducing IT costs and complexity across the district. “We are facing continued budget cuts in the state of California,” Madden notes. “We needed a cost-effective technology platform that would be flexible enough to serve the needs of all our constituents—students, teachers, and administrative staff—and help them achieve a high standard of excellence across all areas of our operations.”

Solution

To accomplish this goal, Fresno Unified School District re-established a relationship with Microsoft, which had been dormant during the school’s financial crisis. There followed a series of strategy meetings and discussions between the two entities. The IT leadership evaluated a broad range of Microsoft® technologies that FUSD could use to optimize its infrastructure to deliver the innovative learning capabilities and decreased IT costs it sought. This involved migrating off the Novell Netware operating system and GroupWise e-mail solution. There were several reasons for this decision.

“Microsoft technologies integrate well with each other for easy IT administration,” says Madden. “They are easy to use, and offer our students the chance to become proficient using productivity tools like Microsoft Office that they will encounter when they graduate. Both these attributes bode well for increased adoption among all parties.”

As the district was contemplating widespread adoption of Microsoft technologies for its 10,000 employees and 80,000 students, the Microsoft account team suggested that FUSD evaluate the benefits of signing a Microsoft School Agreement, which includes the Enterprise Client Access License Suite Agreement. “If we wanted to standardize our IT platform across the district, we needed to centralize purchasing and deploy products district-wide, so every school would have the same tools,” says Madden. “We signed a School Agreement that simplified and reduced the cost of acquiring that platform. Within one comprehensive purchasing agreement, we had access to all the technologies we would require to achieve our goals. It was an important first step in the long process of optimizing and standardizing our IT infrastructure to support student-centered learning across the district.”

Laying the Foundation
FUSD began by laying the foundation for its Microsoft-based IT infrastructure. It used e-rate funds, a federal government funding program that provides discounted telecom rates to schools for voice services and Internet delivery, to perform a major backbone network upgrade that linked its 105 facilities in the largest fiber-optic communication network in California north of Los Angeles. "This was an enormous undertaking, but we worked side by side with AT&T and we used Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as a collaborative project management tool to get things done on time,” says Eric Tilton, IT Manager for Fresno Unified School District. "It would have been difficult to share as much live information between all the project members without the SharePoint team site that we built. We shared digital photos of all of the worksites with marked-up site plans. It was a great project management experience for both FUSD and AT&T."

Fresno Unified replaced Netware with the Windows Server® 2003 operating system and deployed the Active Directory® service to provide central authentication and authorization services for all teachers, staff, and eventually all students within the district. It deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for a scalable and reliable messaging solution, gradually migrating teachers’ GroupWise folders and e-mail messages over to the new solution. The district also deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 with Microsoft Office Live Meeting for instant messaging, presence awareness capabilities, and hosted Web conferencing.

We looked briefly at Lotus Notes, but it was clear that Office SharePoint Server 2007 was a superior product. The clincher for us was its phenomenal integration with the Microsoft Office system. Kurt Madden Chief Technology Officer, Fresno Unified School District

“We knew that the [Microsoft] collaboration and communication solution we chose to replace GroupWise would be the foundational piece of our IT infrastructure,” says Madden. “Enabling our staff to share documents, lesson plans, education videos, and images would be invaluable in creating a new culture of innovation and learning in the school district. We looked briefly at Lotus Notes, but it was clear that Office SharePoint Server 2007 was a superior product. The clincher for us was its phenomenal integration with the Microsoft Office system. This supported our plans to introduce 2007 Office system programs to all our students. We envisioned each student creating work in Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel®, Office PowerPoint®, or Office OneNote® and then saving that work to their My Site to function as a digital portfolio of school projects from kindergarten to Grade 12. To that end, we are creating a My Site for each student within Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

FUSD also took advantage of other technologies in the School Agreement to help safeguard the district’s desktop computers, application servers, and network through an integrated security solution based on the Microsoft Forefront™ security product portfolio. FUSD is taking advantage of the antivirus filtering abilities within Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Forefront Security for SharePoint, and Office Communications Server.

In July 2007, the IT leadership began deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007 into production, working with District Instruction Technology Coordinator Patrick to evangelize the new technology to the staff across the district. “At first, the focus is on getting department and individual school sites up and running, and on providing information more efficiently to teachers across the district so they can begin to see the value,” she explains. “Kurt is a great believer in letting the technology draw people in, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 is so intuitive that we are seeing new sites appearing all the time.” 

Fresno Unified engaged Microsoft Gold Certified Partner SolutionsIQ to create some extra functionality within Office SharePoint Server 2007 to facilitate searching for a student’s emergency contact information, which had previously resided in paper files. “With an implementation of this magnitude and working at this speed, you can’t do it all,” Madden says. “Microsoft has provided a lot of help and guidance, and didn’t let us down with the recommendation of SolutionsIQ. They are a great company, jumping in with the right kind of knowledge and assistance in programming to help us achieve efficient access to key information from anywhere in the district.” 

Technology That Supports Interactive Classroom Learning
FUSD looked carefully at the hardware options available for introducing technology into the classroom, and selected ultra-mobile personal computers (UMPC) from HP and ASUSTeK that were small enough to rest on a desk along with a student’s textbook and papers. While the HP came with the Windows® operating system, ASUSTeK only offered the UMPC with the Linux operating system and a small, 4-gigabyte static drive. But after working with the Microsoft account team, the IT team was able to devise a standard image with Windows XP Professional and a scaled-down version of Microsoft Office that included Office Word 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, Office Excel 2007, and Office OneNote 2007 into the 4-gigabyte space with 160 megabytes to spare.

“We didn’t worry about the smaller memory available to the students, because we wanted their work to be saved in the form of a digital portfolio in our central data center,” says Madden. “Eventually, we plan on having 70,000 students using these computers for their digital portfolios. We purchased 140 terabytes worth of iSCSI storage servers from HP for our data center. They [the storage servers] run Microsoft Storage Server 2003 internally. We chose Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 because it would easily scale to house our very large installation of Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

Benefits

With its commitment to Microsoft productivity technologies, Fresno Unified School District has laid a solid technology foundation on which to build its long-term vision for a cohesive, collaborative working and learning environment at lower cost. “Microsoft is the one vendor that provides all the technologies we need in a single, cost-effective platform to help us prepare our students for the digital literacy requirements of the twenty-first century,” says Madden.

Although FSUD is just beginning to implement its long-term strategic goals for using technology to facilitate student-centered learning, the district has already experienced significant benefits that point to the success of its Microsoft partnership. FUSD is seeing a grassroots adoption of the new collaboration platform among teachers to optimize their productivity in and out of the classroom. Now staff has improved tools and capabilities to perform innovative teaching practices and increase learning outcomes across the district. Students are adapting to the new initiatives quickly, so they are more engaged in the learning process. And the IT department is using Microsoft technologies to simplify its environment and reduce network, and hardware and software management costs, while providing more reliable and secure technology tools for teachers and students.

Fostering Knowledge Sharing Among Teachers
According to Patrick, individual schools are setting up their own SharePoint sites to collaborate and share information so teachers in different subject departments and administrators can work more efficiently. “The staff members for our summer program love the fact that they can collect material from all the principals and make it available for training the summer-school staff through SharePoint sites. Our counseling department finds SharePoint sites an excellent way to disseminate ideas and work with counselors out in the schools, and the folks in charge of training our literacy coaches are keeping everyone up to date with the most current material,” she says. “From my perspective as technology coordinator for the district, SharePoint sites give us a forum to share ideas on how to integrate technology into the classroom. The math department has already placed material on the site, where it’s available to all math teachers in the district.”

Patrick and her colleagues are beginning to develop metadata for all the content now being submitted to the SharePoint sites, to facilitate efficient search. “As we lay the foundation for communication and collaboration, we are tagging the information appropriately so teachers can search for particular topics, or for particular state standards.”

And when FUSD starts to promote Office Communications Server 2007 in summer 2008, staff will no longer have to interrupt their busy days to drive across town and attend district meetings. “How much more cost-effective and efficient is it to bring 30 teachers together while they stay at their own desks and participate in idea sharing?” asks Patrick. “We are developing a SharePoint library of videos for training on anything from how to use technology in the classroom, to how to teach fractions.” 

Fueling Enthusiastic Student and Teacher Interactions
The combination of Microsoft technologies and the UMPC in the classroom is inspiring both teachers and students. Michael Lebsock, a teacher with 23 years of experience within Fresno Unified School District, teaches English and Social Studies at Computech Middle School. He is one of 58 teachers who participated in a pilot project wherein 1,000 UMPCs were distributed to several schools in the district. At Computech, four classrooms are participating in the program, with the computers traveling from room to room on a cart.

“The pilot project was an opportunity to get more technology into the hands of students and to infuse it into our teaching,” he says. “Students needed no encouragement to move from writing on paper to typing on the laptops. We also began using them for research into the Civil War. After we created our own class network, which became a hub for our homework, the kids went crazy blogging, posting pictures, and sharing information. I had kids beating down the door at 7:15 in the morning to start posting messages and checking their homework. I’m reading amazing insights from kids who I never heard speak in the classroom. Now that we have the My Sites for every student, they can keep all their work and refer back to it in later years as they progress in the curriculum.”

Next year, Michael is planning to connect with teachers in Williamsburg, Virginia, to start an online dialogue between his class and a school in that city, to help his students understand how people interpret history differently, depending on their environment. “My students are fascinated about what other kids think, but they rarely get to see beyond their neighborhood,” he says. “Using technology to help expand their horizons beyond the classroom is invaluable.”

Patrick relates similar stories from her observations of other schools participating in the UMPC pilot program, where teachers are rising to the challenge of integrating the technology into learning in a way that seems natural and intuitive. Teachers are spending less time delivering lectures at the front of the class, and more time guiding students at their desks as they work with the new computers.

“One teacher had her grade 4 students dissecting owl pellets, creating videos to record their contents, and interviewing their classmates about the results of their findings, as part of a digital lab report,” she says. “Another science teacher had her class create Excel spreadsheets to record each other’s heart rates at different levels of exertion. A grade 2 class created their animal projects in PowerPoint. And the writing is just taking off! I met one parent volunteer whose son in grade 3 taught himself how to post blogs on his My Site and he continues to be excited about writing for this purpose.”

Tailoring Education to the Individual Student
Teachers are also using the UMPCs and student My Sites to optimize their ability to achieve student-centered learning through continual intervention at the individual level. Fresno Unified is beginning to explore the capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit, which acts like a learning management system that’s integrated into Office SharePoint Server 2007. Teachers can choose from a library of assessments that conform to state standards. If a teacher suspects that one of her students has not grasped a key concept—for example, performing long division—the teacher can choose the appropriate e-learning package and ask the student to open his or her My Site, click on the My Assignment tab, read through the materials, perform the assessment, and submit it back to the library where the teacher can see the scores. At that point the teacher can intervene to ensure that the student doesn’t fall further behind.

“It’s the combination of the UMPC and SharePoint technologies that teachers can use to achieve continual assessment, one of our key goals in student-centered learning,” says Patrick. “Instead of three or four benchmark tests throughout the year, the whole process of ensuring that each student is performing to state standards can be handled online between individual students and the teacher, at any time. This way, no child gets left behind.”

Reduced IT Costs and Complexity
Outside of the classroom, the IT department uses other Microsoft technologies to increase the utilization of its limited technical staff and help optimize their productivity, at the same time reducing costs for the district. "School districts tend to run incredibly lean in comparison to private sector enterprise when it comes to IT staffing levels, so leverage is absolutely critical for us,” explains Tilton. “We've seen a significant improvement in operational efficiency using Microsoft System Center tools. We feel that we've leapt ahead and we're now on par with the best practices for private sector IT departments.”

Fresno Unified is an early adopter of the Microsoft Hyper-V™ technology for server virtualization, and is striving to replace more expensive products from other virtualization vendors while expanding its use of virtual servers in the data center. FUSD also uses Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 for monitoring the health and operational state of its business-critical servers, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 for desktop management of its new UMPC deployments, and System Center Data Protection Manager for backup and archival purposes.

"When we started revamping the technology infrastructure at Fresno Unified School District, we said we wanted to take this district from 'worst to first'. With Microsoft technologies, we're making that vision a reality,” concludes Tilton. "In almost 20 years of IT experience, I've never had as much visibility and control over what's happening in the data center right at my fingertips as I do today. It's an exciting, revolutionary leap forward for us, made possible by new data center management tools from Microsoft."

Also, FUSD was able to free investments made in pre-existing security vendors by taking advantage of the availability of the Microsoft Forefront line of security products found in the School Agreement. FUSD retired its McAfee desktop antivirus solution and replaced it with the Microsoft Forefront Client Security suite to help safeguard the schools’ computers and server operating systems against spyware, viruses, worms, and malware. FUSD went from a desktop virus product to an enterprise-level security solution at no extra cost.

“Budget cuts are here to stay, but when you standardize on a single, scalable suite of products from Microsoft, you immediately reduce your costs,” concludes Madden. “With products tied together through Active Directory, and with the Microsoft Office system linking back to an enterprise-class communication infrastructure like Office SharePoint Server 2007, which in turn ties in with Exchange Server so people can share calendars and organize their time, we have a compelling platform to bring structure and order to our very large organization. How do we measure the success of our partnership with Microsoft? After watching our teachers innovate new ways of using technology in the classroom, and seeing how quickly the students respond, Microsoft will continue to be an integral part of our future.”

Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization
With infrastructure optimization, you can build a secure, well-managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure that can reduce overall IT costs, make better use of resources, and become a strategic asset for the business. The Infrastructure Optimization model—with basic, standardized, rationalized, and dynamic levels—was developed by Microsoft using industry best practices and Microsoft’s own experiences with enterprise customers. The Infrastructure Optimization model provides a maturity framework that is flexible and easily used as a benchmark for technical capability and business value.

For more information about Microsoft infrastructure optimization, go to:
www.microsoft.com/businessproductivity

 

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Solutions IQ products and services, call 425 451-2727 or visit the Web site at:
www.solutionsiq.com

For more information about Fresno Unified School District products and services, call 559 457-3000 or visit the Web site at:
www.fresno.k12.ca.us