iPads deployed to all students enrolled in Chinese Language Courses

What’s the status of the district’s 1:1 iPad pilot in our Chinese Language courses?
iPads were distributed to students back in November, but the iPad was used only in the classroom. This past week, the release form was sent home to parents that provides them with the ability to let students take the device home.

What if the agreement is never signed?
If the agreement isn’t signed, the student is allowed to leave the iPad in the classroom.

Does the district have any additional plans to expand 1:1 access?
Not at this time.  We are just at the start of this pilot and we’d like to see it through to see its impact first.

For more details, we encourage you to review…

iPad Policies and Guidelines

iPad Student Parent Agreement

Changes to Infinite Campus Messenger

Our parents may have noticed that our district’s email notifications are no longer coming from messenger@wdmcs.org  and are now coming from a different address (delivery@critsend.com on behalf of no-reply@wdmcs.net)

Why the changes?      |        What is it doing for us?

When we were sending notices out through messenger@wdmcs.org, we were finding a large number messages were being held as spam or not delivered at all.   It turns out that providers like yahoo.com aren’t big fans of having our daily emails and our high-bulk messages coming from the same source, so we’ve had to split up our emails.  In addition, we are now sending out Infinite Campus messages through a 3rd party email server, critsend.com.  In the end, this helps ensure delivery of our email notifications as critsend helps handle any requirements that the providers request.

Advantages:

* 99.4% delivery rate.  We’re now seeing the highest delivery rate that we’ve ever had.

* We now receive automated notifications when emails are either blocked by providers, identified as spam, or even reported as spam.  It’s helpful for us to be automatically notified when these situations occur so we can contact providers to begin working on clearing them up.

Disadvantages: 

* The delivery is slower.   Sending mail through critsend.com takes longer than sending out through our own server.  For example, our high school’s daily announcements would normally take 15 to 20 minutes to send to 2,600 users.  Sending through critsend.com appears to take closer to an hour.  However, in the end, if it takes an hour to make sure that folks actually receive the message – that seems to be worthwhile.

Here’s an overview of the messages that our district has sent out through Infinite Campus Messenger in the last week….

Date	# emails sent	Filtered	Bounced	Blocked by ISP	Total Blocked	Delivery rate
5-Dec	7078	0	21	6	27	99.62%
6-Dec	10543	0	54	13	67	99.36%
7-Dec	8919	0	29	5	34	99.62%
8-Dec	174	0	0	0	0	100.00%
9-Dec	0	0	0	0	0
10-Dec	13121	7	41	21	69	99.47%
11-Dec	7482	6	17	17	40	99.47%
12-Dec	13,001	11	31	23	65	99.50%
13-Dec	9838	16	20	8	44	99.55%
14-Dec	13,272	23	35	14	72	99.46%
15-Dec	121	1	0	0	1	99.17%
16-Dec	932	5	2	1	8	99.14%
17-Dec	20,138	47	42	21	110	99.45%
	104,619	116	292	129	537	99.49%