Education

Overview

Our “TOOLS FOR SCHOOLS” program puts a full array of educational resources at your disposal. We offer a one-stop-shop and a complete start-to-finish solution for your educational technology needs.

To provide the best possible educational environment for your students , our goal as an Educational IT Support contractor is to offer your school a full array of ERate and non-ERate equipment and services to enable your school. As an ERate service provider, we recognize that the ERate program provides a generous, but restrictive funding source for specific network infrastructure and maintenance. Using ERate funding sources in conjunction with grants and wise technology budget decisions can provide a cost effective method of providing the classroom technology and support services necessary to succeed in today’s challenging educational marketplace.

We can Help

By giving you the benefit of our experience and knowledge, we can help you make decisions about your technology environment. Our staff has considerable educational experience including a NM licensed k-8 teacher with middle school science endorsement, a NM licensed k-12 education technology coordinator, with an MAE in curriculum, a bachelors in IT, over a decade in the computer industry, and 4 years teaching experience at primary, middle and secondary levels. The combination of technical and educational knowledge allows us to advise you both from an educational as well as technical perspective.

If you have an internal IT Support person or team, we can support them and provide the extra manpower and experience they may need for large or complex projects.

Compliance

Our goal is to help you to the best of our ability while being mindful of any ethical, conflict-of-interest or ERate restrictions. We take ERate compliance seriously because our livelihood and reputation depends on it.

We have been working with schools since 1995 and participating in ERate since 2003. We have a deep understanding of the rules, deadlines and complexity of the program. In spite of that, we always believe the best practice is to check and double-check ourselves to make sure we are giving you good advice and are compliant ourselves. In 2009, we hired a former auditor to perform a rigorous 3-day audit of our company. Fortunately, we were pleased to know our that our methods are sound and that we would pass an ERate audit. We can help you be ERate audit compliant too.

We’re in it for the long term

Working with ERate and school budget cycles takes time and patience. We recognize that it is often more prudent to take the time to get it right rather than trying to rush through a large purchase this year. We approach our job from the perspective that we want to be working with you for many years. We know that you have many companies to choose from, and we recognize that we need to earn your business year after year. We do that by working with you all year long, giving you good advice and support and making wise, cost-saving yet effective technology suggestions.

ERate Eligible vs Ineligible Services

ERate is a very important tool, but needs to be balanced with end user support, educational applications, data backups, professional development and training in order to provide the full spectrum of classroom technology necessary to properly educate your students. There is a clear line between eligible and ineligible services. Basically, ERate is concerned with telecom services: phone systems and getting the Internet to instructional areas. Any network infrastructure such as servers, cabling, wireless equipment, switches, firewalls or routers that are needed to accomplish that task are eligible. Anything actually used in the classroom (or administrative areas) like computers, software, projectors, smartboards, printers, training or any IT support for any of these components is ineligible.

From the list above, you can see that it is impossible to use ERate exclusively to fund your classroom technology needs. Therefore, you will need to have other sources to provide the essential ERate-ineligible equipment and services necessary for an effective classroom technology environment.

The TOOLS for SCHOOLS solution

At CamNet, we believe in a holistic approach to supporting education that includes both ERate eligible and ERate ineligible services. That is the only way to properly support your educational environment. We suggest that you supplement your ERate contract with a separate IT Support contract to allow us to provide vital support for all your educational technology.

Start-to-Finish Solution

• Evaluate We can perform a free on-site analysis and give you advice on what products, services and software might improve your school’s educational technology environment.

• Design We can maximize your existing infrastructure or build a new system with the latest technology. Either way, we will design a cost effective solution tailored to your needs.

• Purchase We can provide all the hardware and software necessary for a turn-key solution or we can work with you to help you procure the equipment through other procurement vehicles such as state contracts. We thoroughly research each system component to ensure proper functionality and the best price available.

• Install We can perform a complete network installation from the cabling to the installation of servers, workstations and all applications. We minimize the impact our work has on your productivity: we work after hours when possible; we work long hours to complete projects quickly.

• Configure Our goal is to provide you with educational technology that does what you want it to, is easy to use and requires minimal maintenance. There are many design and configuration methods we can use to maximize the effectiveness of the technology in an educational environment.

• Train We can train your network administrators and your personnel to use the network effectively. Training is the key to a successful deployment.

• Support We can administer your network for you or support your IT staff. You can choose a contract support plan or our “pay as you go” plan. In either case, we work hard to ensure that your system is up and running when you need it.

LIST of tools for schools services

• Divided into ERate Eligible and ERate Ineligible sections.

ERate Eligible Equipment and Services

• ERate Internal Connections

o Phone Systems – Nortel & Cisco VOIP phone systems.

o Servers o Backup solutions o Wireless Infrastructure

o Switches, Routers & Firewalls

o Cabling o Fiber Optics

o Video Distribution & Distance Learning including Video over IP

o Design, Engineering, Installation, Configuration, Documentation & Project Management

o Training

o Onsite and Remote Support

• ERate Basic Maintenance

Erate Ineligible Equipment and Services

• IT Support contracts for Non-ERate services

o to service your computers and networks over and above the limited ERate Basic Maintenance program. This allows us to assist your school with Classroom technology and applications not covered under ERate Basic Maintenance.

• Grant Writers

o We recently helped 10 schools connect with professional grant writers for custom written applications to the Enhancing Education Through Technology Grant.

• Technology Plan assistance

o We are very familiar with the Tech Plan requirements and can assist you and your IT department with gathering and documenting the necessary information for the Tech Plan.

• Classroom Technology

o Smartboards

o Learning & Testing Applications

Renaissance Learning

BIE Reads

NWEA

DIBELS

o Document Cameras

o Wireless Slates

o Classroom participation/Smart Response

o Computers

o Printers

o Configuration and implementation of your network to allow roaming student profiles, network security, bandwidth allocation, student and faculty web activity tracking.