New school wired (and wireless) for the future

Jon Kaps hears a common refrain from visitors to Glacier High School: "I wish we had that when I was in high school."

Sometimes they make the comment while checking out the commons area and on-campus food options. At other times, they're gaping in amazement at the gym or the performance hall.

Most often, however, Kaps hears the envious comment from people who are observing the school's high-tech equipment.

"People especially like the video stuff," he said. "Everybody loves to tell stories. They like to sit down and put stories together with pictures and sounds."

As Glacier's audio-visual media specialist, Kaps helps students create presentations.

Sometimes that's as simple as putting together displays with posterboard and markers, he said, but more often, students want to do something a little more high-tech, like PowerPoint presentations and videos.

"We're trying to get video going," he said. "It's really remarkable. It used to be it was really hard to do anything like that. It used to be 8-millimeter film that you'd have to process, glue together and cut."

Even the library has gone high-tech. While there are thousands of books on the shelves, a certain percentage of the library's core collection is electronic.

"In my area, what's been highly impacted are reference materials and periodicals," librarian John York said. "We have got a growing number of reference materials in electronic format."

Thanks to the school's wireless network, students and teachers don't have to go to the library to read those materials, he added.

"Many of these things are totally accessible anywhere in the building," he said. "Kids are not coming to the library as often, but they are still accessing the information. Many of them are accessing it from home as well."

The school's wireless network is centrally controlled, according to David Beyer, Kalispell Public Schools technology director. One central unit programs every other computer in the building.

"What's nice about that is you don't have to program individual access points," he said. "You can program one unit, and it programs the rest."

The system's switches are capable of recognizing viruses and shutting down individual computers that are doing "too much chattering."

A fiber-optic cable serves as the network's "connecting backbone," he said, and copper wires connect desktop computers. The whole system is state-of-the-art and very fast.

The system has the potential to benefit the rest of the school district, he added.

"What we have at Glacier, as far as the phone system and wireless network, allows us to expand to other buildings without major upgrade costs," he said. "We can piggyback off Glacier's infrastructure and use things purchased here to impact other buildings in the district."

Employees still are adjusting to the equipment, including the phone system.

Teachers can search for any district employee's phone number on their own phones and can check their voice mail via e-mail.

But the staff has only just begun utilizing the system's features, Beyer said.

"There are things that they're not using as far as the capability goes, but that's the same [with] any system," he said. "The more you use it in different ways, the easier it becomes and the more effective you are at using it."

Staff members had some technology training before school started, he said, but their primary concern was adjusting to a new building and a two-high-school district. Beyer said he hopes to have more specific training sessions as time allows.

"Right now we're still in the stage where we're working out all the bugs," he said. "But it is really exciting to see what Glacier has, because it's a great facility."

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com