Education Blog

Blake Chism is the Director of Information Services – Orange Unified School District, Orange, CA.

I have been at Orange Unified for a little over two years now and am amazed at the way in which technology is embraced by students, staff and administration. We have a vision for engaging each student on a personal level, and technology plays a large role in that.

The concept behind Stoneware was first introduced to me as a breakthrough product that promised to deliver cloud computing to the public sector in a cost-effective manner that was easy to roll out. I have since found Stoneware to do that and a whole lot more. As a public school district, we are constantly faced with challenges such as: erratic funding (a reduction of $875 per student this year alone), socio-economic disparity among schools, and disparate ranges of technical competency in staff. I recently installed Stoneware and began looking for ways to address some of these issues head-on. By moving computing up into the cloud, we can address the issue of funding in that nearly any computer with a browser can access the cloud. This will allow us to extend the life of our computers as we move to hosted applications and away from the computer-centric model.

Stoneware will also allow students to log in to their school accounts from public libraries, home computers or community centers and gain access to the same applications and documents that they have at school. This will go a long way towards equalizing the playing field in terms of access to technology. The ability to bring everything together in one place is the piece of Stoneware that I can see as the being the greatest benefit to our staff at all technical levels. The single sign-on (SSO) solution in Stoneware means that staff can move in and out of their various school-related applications without having to remember passwords, URLs or worry about security. They only need to remember one log-in for all of their activities.

I am just beginning the process of developing a vision for Stoneware in my district, and will be rolling it out over the next few months. I hope that you will follow this Blog to see about my progress. Please let me know about any discussions you are having about Stoneware and what it can do to help move education forward.