Students and staff at Holy Trinity Catholic School Division can expect to receive some new computers in the upcoming school year.

The Board was presented with the 2022-23 Technology Report during the division's April meeting held April 17. The report outlined the technology department’s plans for IT Security, Service Availability, Supporting Staff, and plans for the future.

"We've started to implement a four-year lease cycle that we have for our devices," said Supervisor of Learning and Technology Mark Selinger. "We are getting into the last year of that four-year cycle, so moving into the following school year will be an opportunity for us to replace some of those devices."

Selinger notes that will include laptop devices that are used by classroom teachers as well as Chromebook devices that are handed out to students. He adds classroom technology such as TV's will also be replaced.

"The technology report was an opportunity for us to share with the Board what we are doing in our department in terms of protecting the web, supporting our staff and also our plans going forward in terms of making it more sustainable replacement and support of technology devices going forward so that we can ensure that the devices that we have in the hands of our students and our teachers are the most up-to-date and relevant to integrating educational technology in the classroom," explained Selinger.

Below are some of the highlights that were presented to the Board.

Protecting the Web

- The division subscribes to a service called GoGuardian which monitors our Chromebook's web activity.
- We subscribe to the CIRA Cybersecurity Awareness Training
- Platform to provide phishing and security training for all staff.
- The IT department runs antivirus software on all division-owned devices.
- Microsoft's Advanced Threat Protection network blocked 8700 spam emails, 3300 phishing emails, and 50 emails containing malware.

Devices

- The IT department runs antivirus software on all division-owned devices
- Upgraded firewalls
- Maintain our existing devices while replacing a portion of devices each year
- Replace our classroom SMART projector/touch boards with Televisions
- Installed  interactive touch televisions in our K- classrooms
- Begun installing WiFi 6 access points for increased coverage and speed for our classroom technology
- The division continues to explore moving services to the cloud for increased availability.
- The division has purchased a natural gas generator to keep services running in Moose Jaw during a power outage.

Supporting Staff

- Holy Trinity has two help desks - Education Technology or
- Information Technology
- Total IT tickets in the last year - 1795
- Total EdT tickets in the last year - 351
- Strive to respond within 4 hours, greatly exceeded

2023-2024 Plans (Year 4)

- Replacing roughly one quarter of our staff laptops with newer models
- Replacing one quarter of our outdated Chromebooks
- Division Office servers and network switches are scheduled for replacement.
- Vanier Collegiate phone system is scheduled to be updated
- Most of our school network switches were replaced in 2020, as part of our pro-active maintenance the units that were not replaced then are scheduled for replacement this year
- Classroom display replacement is proceeding well, we plan to replace 20 more units this year.