Technology At Tuolumne Schools
Technology Services @ Tuolumne County Superintendent of Schools
The Technology Services Department at the Tuolumne County Superintendent of Schools provides top quality technical leadership, support, networking, security and professional development for the schools of Tuolumne County and greater region.
Technology Partner to our Districts
The TCSOS Technology team acts as a technology partner to the County’s eleven school districts and their schools. We provide a range of services, from desktop support to full network infrastructure design and implementation projects.
With the push towards one-to-one devices at most of our districts, the need for an upgraded networking infrastructure has become a top priority. Our team has worked with districts and telco providers to increase bandwidth between the County Office and our districts and schools. To date, all but four school sites are connected to the Internet via high speed fiber optics (100Mbps or 1000Mbps).
Having a robust broadband connection is important, but if campus networks can’t support the high volume of traffic, they too must be improved. The TCSOS technology team has worked with many of our districts to upgrade their local area networks, including gigabit wiring projects and campus-wide wireless deployments.
Services for County Schools
The Tuolumne County Superintendent of Schools acts as the ISP (Internet Service Provider) to our counties eleven school districts. We provide low-cost high speed Internet access through our dual 1Gb circuit. In order to keep up with demand and be prepared for the demands of next generation classroom technology, the County Office will be upgrading our circuit in the upcoming months to dual 10Gb circuits (part of the CVIN/CENIC collaborative project).
The County Office provides Internet Content Filtering for districts and schools in order to comply to the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). We also provide SPAM blocking and email hosting services for our districts.
Through our IMC (Instructional Media Center) Web Portal, educators have 24 hour access to high quality online resources, including California Streaming, World Book Online and BrainPop. TCSOS will be upgrading our portal in the next few months in order to keep up with the anticipated growth of classroom devices.
This year all the schools our county (and state) have been participating in the Smarter Balanced Field Test, the online computer based replacement to the STAR test. The County Office has played a pivotal role in working with districts to ensure the tests run smoothly, ensuring that networking infrastructure is reliable, and providing training to staff on how to prepare and administer the test.
Professional Development and Vision
A priority of the County Office is to ensure that the teachers and staff of our schools are up to speed on the latest classroom technologies and informed about new emerging tools and pedagogical techniques. We host workshops and provide trainings to administrators, teachers, classified and other certificated educators. Current popular topics include iPad, Chromebook, Google Apps for Education and the “flipped classroom”. We also provide skills classes for tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Our skills classes are open to educators and the general public. Look for our Fall Technology class lineup soon.
