A Look Back...

This photo shows Dr. Richard Andre of East Central University demonstrating BASIC programming code to students of Konawa Public School on the first computer purchased by the district. This picture was probably taken in 1978.

Dr. Andre was well known and loved throughout the Oklahoma Educational community for his knowledge and enthusiasm. He made frequent lectures at educational and technological conventions and meetings throughout the state.

The TRS-80 computer shown in the photo boasted 16k RAM and a cassette recorder for storing data. The computer was housed in the keyboard case and there was a separate monitor. There were no diskette drives available at the time. When they were introduced a few years later they measured 5.25 inches. If you wanted to run a program on a TRS-80 you wrote the code, keyed it in, saved it to tape, ran it, debugged it, and had a great time--up hill both ways.

At that time, schools which had a computer course of any kind usually offered only a programming course. The personal computer was generally regarded as a hobbist's tool and no specific "killer application" had yet arrived to make it a viable home or office applicance. The first tremendously successful application to arrive on the market was "VisiCalc". This name was short for the "Visible Calculator" and it soon developed into what we know today as a spreadsheet. A variety of word processors were sparing with the typewriter at about the same time.

Here we have the same computer some twenty years later. It was found in a pile of cables, equipment, and junk headed for the trash. When all the pieces were found and connected, the machine still worked. It is in storage today and maybe someone will dig it out again in another twenty years.

Just for fun we put another piece of ancient technology on top of the monitor. Do you know what it is? Ask your parents if they ever learned to use a slide rule in school. Yes, some of us are old enough to remember when the pocket calculator was invented. In the old days, if you needed to do trig functions, logs, exponentials, etc. with more accuracy than the slide rule could provide, you also had a book of mathematical tables to look up results in and then interpolate to approximate your result. Fun stuff.

Technology has evolved in Konawa since the late 1970's. Today the district has an robust and capable network environment. An overview of our facility is provided below. This picture shows one of five racks of network installed in 1999. Our network has a fiber backbone and 10/100 Cat-5 cable utilizing Cisco switches and is connect to the Internet via two T-1 circuits with a Jupiter router. VLAN routing is performed on a stack of Cisco 3750 switches. We try to replace aging equipment as funds become available. Thanks to e-Rate funding, we have been able to maintain our infrastructure and servers.

The average life span of computers on our campus is seven years for Macs and four years for PCs. The District has adopted Microsoft Office as the campus-wide application suite and Easy Grade Pro for our gradebook program.

Few schools can provide a budget for technology in Oklahoma and Konawa is among that group of schools. Instead, the district must continuously seek special funding opportunites such as grants and local bond issues. We are quite proud of the infrastructure and equipment which was obtained only through much determination and hard work. Our current focus is on designing and implementing a plan of increased mobility and stability. The technological goal of Konawa Public Schools is to provide our students with the technological environment to facilitate our mission, "Encouraging and motivating each child to meet the challenges, choices, and opportunities of the future."