Welcome to the first edition of the Technology Update — a newsletter aimed at keeping staff informed of technology matters in our district. It will be distributed to all schools at the start of each term and will contain details of up-coming training courses, Departmental initiatives, ideas on integrating technology into your curriculum and other matters. Please feel free to copy and distribute it to all staff.

A common complaint from schools is the slow access speeds to the Internet. Anyone who has had a whole class hit on a web page at the same time will know how frustrating the delay can be. When you multiply that class by all the other classes in NSW accessing the Internet at the same time, with all data passing through the same bank of computers in Sydney, then the cause for the delay becomes apparent. However, the news is not all bad.

Those schools in our district who have had their ISDN line installed have a permanent , 64K connection to the Lismore TAFE. From there is a much greater bandwidth connection to ITB in Sydney.

The Department has recently upgraded its Internet computers in Sydney and have installed large caching computers at Lismore TAFE and the other POPs (Points of Presence) around the state.

What does this mean? Previously, when a student or teacher accessed a site on the Internet a copy of that site was kept (cached) on the computers in Sydney. The next time someone wanted that site, their computer checked with the Sydney computer, discovered the copy and downloaded it from there. This is much faster than getting the site each time from Bangladesh or wherever it came from.

Now, a copy is kept at Lismore as well. This means that your request for www.dinosaurs.com may only have to go as far a Lismore, speeding up the process even more.

What can a school do? It can install its own caching computer, called a proxy server. See inside for more details

A technology plan is an outline of how your school is going to integrate technology into teaching and learning. It contains details of hardware and software requirements and, most importantly, staff training and development. A well constructed Technology Plan will help you take maximum advantage of equipment such as the computers supplied in the Computers In Schools Program (CISP).

If you would like some advice or support in developing or updating a technology plan contact your Technology Adviser who will arrange a visit.