My Fifth Year as Director of Technology

If you had to pick one cable that is the absolute most important cable at a school, this is it. It’s the main fiber optic cable that comes into a campus from a nearby pole. Similarly, if you were to make a list titled “If This Cable Breaks, I’m Okay”, this cable would be at the very bottom of that list. This main fiber line feeds internets to the entire school. And on August 16, 2018, it broke.

In the spirit of making and construction, here are my four goals of the past school year:

1. Continue to upgrade and fine tune Hillbrook’s infrastructure.
2. Complete The Hub. Work with Ken Hay to procure equipment and tools, Colleen Schilly leverage the new schedule, and Mark Silver and Margaret Randazzo to execute the construction of The Hub.
3. Design and Run the CTE Online Summit
4. Develop an Ed Tech Think Tank trust of tech-forward parents.

Continue to upgrade and fine tune Hillbrook’s infrastructure.

Fun fact: most conduit that houses telecommunication lines is 48 inches underground. Another fun fact: most conduit going into the Hillbrook server room were 24 inches underground (until this school year).

I knew that paying particular attention to our school’s infrastructure would be important with both the growth of the middle school and the construction of The Hub. But I didn’t know just how much time I would spend completely rebuilding our underground infrastructure. On August 16, 2018 a bulldozer broke the main fiber optic line coming into our campus while getting the foundation of our big makerspace foundation to grade. The most important cable on campus was only ten inches or so underground, not the expected 48 inches. And in that moment, all internet connectivity stopped. Within eight hours, we were back online, but the consequences of this break took most of the school year to fix.

From August 26 through October 29, I worked with Aaron from Swenson Construction and many, many third party vendors from Comcast to plan, coordinate, and repair the main fiber line. Ultimately, on October 29, we ran new fiber optic cable in a more direct path from the south side of campus to the west of the construction site, and into the server room.

Most of the time I spent on infrastructure this school year was on running new fiber to each building on campus. We needed to move all conduit at least 48 inches below grade to get out of the way of the new buildings. Fiber optic cable is made of glass, though, so when you run conduit two feet deeper and take a slightly longer path, you can’t just add an extension cord… you need to run all new fiber. Over the course of the year I worked with Swenson and Talisman Networks to lay new conduit around the server room and pull all new fiber to nearly every building. Over the past several years, our fiber infrastructure ran into problems, and most of those led quickly to catastrophic problems. Repairing those quickly was always the priority; however, many repairs involved daisy chaining one switch to another instead of connecting a switch/building directly to the server room. This new infrastructure work was our opportunity to thoughtfully and correctly run fiber to each building using best practices. This is not nearly as easy or quick as one would believe. Along the way, we discovered every path of every cable both underground, under buildings, and in closets throughout campus. We found every vault (the concrete rectangular thing buried underground with the big heavy concrete lid) and found every pull rope that connected every building. We found every switch closet and every trap door, and then we ran fiber directly from nearly every building directly to the server room. That’s called a Home Run, and that’s best practices for fiber infrastructure.

Along the way, I created a custom Google map with layers notating every fiber path, vault, switch, and cable underground. I shared this with Talisman and our facilities team in hopes of keeping this institutional knowledge around for a while. In the past, maps of infrastructure work were lost; this should solve that problem for future Tech Directors and Facility Managers! Our new fiber is 10 gigabit armored fiber, so it should serve the school well for about 50 years. This, along with the detailed network map, should provide future tech directors a solid infrastructure with notes detailing paths and access points.

Complete the Hub

The Hub is what we’re calling the construction of a new building, the 2000 sq ft addition of an existing building, and the remodel of our art classrooms. It will combine our multipurpose spaces, art, and Makerspaces with the goals of increasing collaboration and iteration of projects, ideas, and learning experiences for our learners. A version of this goal has been been with me for the last three years. You can read more in my blog post about my third year as tech director, when we really started our thinking around the Hub.

Back in my first goal, you heard that our data infrastructure was obstructing the path of our new building underground, and that rerouting the cables and conduit took substantial planning and time to execute. Hub construction slowed in the winter due to two causes: massive amounts of rain and massive amounts of stuff found underground. Facilitating the coordination of rerouting all of our underground telecommunications lines was a significant part of my work in the fall and winter. Working with Swenson Construction and Talisman, all data lines were successfully rerouted with minimal downtime, and construction continued.

Looking at the bigger picture, the most obvious way this goal was achieved was through our weekly Hub meetings. While coordinating construction events and making decisions was definitely a big part of this meeting, the most important part for me was always looking ahead to what decisions meant for our students and our teachers once the construction was complete. Sometimes this was a concrete decision like where to run data lines in the new building, but more often it was thinking about what our students will be doing in the new space, and making decisions about how to best support them. It was talking with the art teachers that are directly impacted by the construction, and it was weekly planning with Hub Director Ken Hay and Hub Engineer Shea Ellerson to figure out what we’re going to do with the upstairs spaces—who will work there, what tools will be there, what walls do we or don’t we build there, and how current spaces might change as the Hub comes online. More recently with the Hub opening being moved to the late fall, we focused on looking at which rooms (like the iLab and Ken’s art class) needed to remain, and when we might move into the new spaces.

Design and Run the CTE Online Summit

This goal has been through many iterations. Let’s just skip to the end where it’s more exciting!

We are working with CUE to host the first ever CUE Master Class around flexible learning spaces. CUE has only offered two master classes thus far—The 5E Learning Cycle with Ramsey Musallam, and Transform Teaching with macOS with Andy Losik. CUE Master Classes “empower you to be in charge of your own professional learning. Choose your course, connect with other online learners, and partner with some of the most passionate, expert CUE Lead Learners.” We will be the third master class! All the details are ironed out; we will host four online courses from mid-September through the end of October.

It’s worth noting that our public work around flexible learning spaces has teed us up perfectly for this partnership with CUE. Our conference presentations, blog posts, social media posts, and most importantly, our CTE podcast have all established us as a leader in this space. When speaking with Cate from CUE, it was a natural fit for us to enter into this partnership.

Develop an Ed Tech Think Tank trust of tech-forward parents

Boy did I overthink this goal! Similar to the goal above, I had many iterations of what this would look like. It ultimately ended being a lunch meeting at Brooke Acres with a dozen parents hosted my Mark Silver, Annie Makela, and me. Our curated conversation was around screen time and kids—there is conflicting data around what’s best for kids, and we dove headfirst into the topic of when, where, how, and why we give our students and our kids access to screens. We invited a diverse group of parents to this event; interestingly, mostly lower school parents ended up coming to the event. Aside from the younger student/heavy group, the people at the table were from diverse backgrounds and had a wide range of opinions around how we might better use technology at schools.

The biggest takeaway from this group is that we should have a healthy skepticism around devices. The biggest takeaway from this event is that we can and will have more events like this. A suggestion was made to host future meetings immediately after bus drop off near Loma Coffee in Los Gatos. This would take less time away from parents and would have the added benefit of delicious caffeine in our bloodstreams.

We are fortunate to have parents in our community that are absolute experts in the field of technology, and this first meeting was a great initial step towards developing partnerships that will help shape the school’s vision of how and why we use technology. As we share this work broadly, I am hopeful that this vision will also spread to schools nationwide as they also grapple with how we thoughtfully use technology in classrooms.

The end of year five

As administrators, there is often the day we think we’re going to have, and then there’s the day we actually have. More than any other year for me, this school year was definitely a case of the year I thought I’d have versus the year I actually had. While I was not expecting to spend hundreds of hours working on fiber optic cable paths this school year, it’s pretty incredible to think that choices I help make will impact our school for the next 50 years. In a much less tangible way, I know that the support I gave teachers and students every day will also make a long lasting impact in their lives. On a more personal note, next year will be the first time all three of my kids will be with me at Hillbrook. As other senior administrators watched their children graduate from Hillbrook, this new era full of Selak kids has me looking forward to the work ahead with great optimism and hope as we build things that will last for years to come.