School Technology
Andrea Nunziante, Director
At Priory, technology is a key element in the educational development of our students. Students are growing up in a world where technology is critical for their futures. It is our belief that technology should remain up-to-date and evolve to reflect the ever-changing technological needs of our modern world. In the past two years, we have made several technological improvements on our campus. Perhaps the most visible to students and parents is our online grading system and the unified wifi network. First launched full throttle in the 2007-08 academic year, Priory successfully implemented and integrated PowerSchool into the framework of the School. PowerSchool provides for considerable interaction between faculty and parents. Its online grading program provides ready access to a student’s daily performance, teacher comments, and daily assignments. Faculty can more effectively manage their classes by having direct access to student information at school as well as away from school. Parents, students and teachers have 24/7 access to the information contained in PowerSchool via the parent/teacher portal. The parent portal also allows for access to posted assignments, the course syllabus, attendance information and behavioral reports. During our 2008-09 winter trimester, the School implemented an online signup for parent/teacher conferences, both in the high school and the Junior School. This process allowed families to register online in the convenience of their own home. No longer was their jostling for a space on the sign-up sheet or arriving to the conferences only to find that your son had signed you up for six conferences in 30 minutes. Teachers also have abilities within this program which allow them to create schedules according to their coaching, monastic or educational conflicts.
Andrea Nunziante and Derek Ward showcase the backbone of Priory's technology infrastruction.
In the spring of 2008, Priory introduced two new web sites. Created exclusively for the Priory alumni community, the alumni web site is constructed to resemble a community web site similar to known social web sites like Facebook or MySpace. The second web site was designed exclusively for the Priory School. These two new web sites provide real time data and information about upcoming school and sporting events, maps to these events, calendar items, or recent significant accomplishments within the school.
Finally, a new appliance was recently installed to provide better security and traffic monitoring. On campus data is now more secure thanks to daily backups and monitoring of all campus servers. Our technology team, composed of myself, Nick White (currently deployed in Afghanistan) and Derek Ward, works continually to maintain our system and train our faculty on its effective use. Our work is ongoing, since technology is continually evolving. This summer will see us updating the high school computer lab (301), the library computer lab, all of the Junior School classroom, and the gymnasium. In addition, we are working on a new long-term technology plan which takes into account all of the improvements on our campus. Stay tuned for more exiting IT news in the near future!
This past year, several upgrades were completed within the actual infrastructure of the Priory network. These upgrades included replacing servers and core switches within our unified wifi network. The new switches provide a full 1GB between classrooms and buildings. This change facilitates faster access to Internet resources for both teachers and students. The improved wifi network also allows for better management of our wifi system. 40