WHS INTERNET NODE! WHS INTERNET NODE! First, special thanks.... You see before you the domain called "whs.wsd.wednet.edu" (Domain name received on 25 Oct 96, prior operation via static IP number). It has been active since 10 Nov 1994. I'm not the only one who made it happen however. My Independent Study student of two years, who graduated in 1996, Andy Largent was the major force in helping me develop this site.
Others that I need to thank are our Wenatchee School District Network Support Guru: Dave Yancey. Who's help and encouragement have been very much appreciated. And Eric Jensen Director of Medial and Technology, who has put the "wheels on my cart" and given me a push along the way to become the slave to technology that I've become (more about Eric later). Last but not least, I need to thank the Science Department (and Jim Mugg, who was department chair at the time and had vision) who allowed me to have the only color Mac in the department for the first 3 years to do this project.
The
history of this site
is very brief. Andy Largent and I were working on a different project in 1993
using modem telecommunications. Soon after our school district became "hard
wired" to the Internet. As I had been using the Internet since 1992 I was one
of the first to get the Internet ball rolling in our district. More connectivity
came to me with a NASA grant in 1993. By that time I was learning about UNIX
and becoming familiar with it's concepts and usage. The
spring of 1994 began the exploration process regarding
launching our own WWW site from my classroom.
Surfing, downloading, reading and trying to make our Macintosh Centris 610 serve HTML WWW pages became an obsession. Andy and I launched the site in early November of 1994 and our best guess is our first pages were served around the 10th. Without the help of any corporation/business/ISP to sponsor us, we learned mostly by doing but we were an Internet web node. It was pretty much hit and miss for a while with only 4 pages but by the end of Christmas break I felt confident that we could serve web pages on a stable platform. Andy and I worked on content and developed about a dozen more pages. On 21 Mar 95 we submitted our site to all of the major search engines and we finally declared ourselves "Public". We began as http://168.99.104.151 and received our own domain name on 25 Oct 96. We have always operated independently from any business or corporation.
At this point we became the first educational web site in Washington state as far as we can tell.
Please check our WebStats for more information to verify the data and drop me a note if you know others who can verify otherwise. The second educational web site in the state (as far as we know) was Arbor Heights Elementary who "went public" about a month after we did. Their site is located on a commercial server somewhere in Seattle. Ours has always been in my science classroom at Wenatchee High School, connected through the states WEDNET system. They have a wonderful site and have received great recognition. I recommend that you look them up sometime.
Things were fairly slow for the first 9 months. We sent about 20-40 files per day. Changes and revisions happened daily. It occupied (and still does) lots of my free time after school and well into the evening. We currently have too many files to keep this historical document accurate. We have about 40 GB of files and serve thousands of them each day. More and more teachers are creating subsites and my vision for this site is beginning to see fruition after 12 years. Education is a bit slow to change.
(1996- 1999)After working on the site alone for the 9 months after Andy Largent left, I enlisted the help of some other students. Siobhan Everson-Stewart developed the Sports Section, worked on the Student Handbook and helped to create the new look of our front page. Siobhan has developed the 1997 graduation information as well numerous other pages. She worked on our site for a year an a half before she graduated in 1998. Sally Abbott helped during the 2nd semester of 1997 as well. She worked on department map pages and researched a ton of information. I'm hoping I can get a class to allow more students to become involved in this process. I have yet to get the final word however.
(1999-2000) Kevin Vaughn assisted me in a variety of web ways and Brandon Gillin translated the school newspaper called the Apple Leaf into our largest growing sub site. Brandon earned national honors for his work. The Apple Leaf is no longer online now that Brandon is gone. More and more teachers are getting on our web site as well. Both Kevin and Brandon worked for 2 years on the web site and have both graduated. It was tough to let them go.
(2000-2001) Nic Driscol posts the bulletin daily as well as the sports schedules and a ton of other things. This is Nic's 2nd year. Another is Steven Asplund who manages the huge Alumni sub site and is the master of Dreamweaver. Steven has been here 1.5 years. The last team member is new as of 2nd semester (.5 years) and is Matt O'Dea. Matt is very creative and has produced a ton of new ideas and tweaks to the web site. He's currently working on a survey solution.
(2001-2002)Web Warriors that are helping out are juniors Matt O'Dea, Steven Asplund and 2 new nerds: junior Kevin Steinburg and freshman Phillip May. Senior Ben Honsinger will be joining Matt during the 2nd semester to work on our Apache server and Mac OS X for special interactivity. We hope to include scripting for specialized chat, surveys, imaging and other cool stuff. Steven, Kevin and Phillip will be continuing the major face lift our site has begun.
(2002-2003) This year we have seniors Matt O'Dea and Kevin Steinburg who are trying to pass their vast years of experience on to our 2 rookie sophomores Mike Reeves and Brian Harms. We are fortunate to have Phillip May back with us who will be working on video production with senior Mike Miller as well as web management. The cast of characters continues to grow. This was an exceptional year. Very full of fun, excitement, technolust, and sleepless nights.
(2003-2004) We are calling this a building year. Returnees are Mike Reeves and Phillip May. New folks to our program are juniors Jason Lorenson and Thomas Benner. Two new freshmen are Nate Symonds and Randy Delozier. Also joining mid-year is Michael Jordan a junior, And Ethan Card a freshmen. This year we are trying to start a new program for Technical help throughout our district called "Omni Help Desk". We will be combining Apples OS Help Desk and Tech Corp Help Desk with our vision to create a multi-layered approach in resolving Tech issues at WHS to be expanded throughout the entire district. Sadly, the teachers haven't used our Omni Help Desk system.
This is the beginning of our website's 10 year anniversary! The new look is blowing away our fans, and we're not stopping there, more and more updates and features will come...if Phil ever did anything. The creator of the W on the front page would be Phillip May, and the creator of the subpage navigation banner is Mike Jordan. Randy also helped in the art areas...but we had to kick his butt into gear to do so.
(2004-2005) This year we added two more members to our crew, Kell Wiggum. Once again Mr. Lorenson decided to add another freshman to our crew, Jack Adamson. The returning warriors for the 2004-2005 school year are as follows: sophomores, Ethan Card, Nate Symonds, and Randy Delozier. Also Mike Reeves, who returned to finish off his high school career with us. He will defiantly be missed. Also, for your information, our Omni Help Desk part of our class has basically died. We have almost completely moved back to the normal Web Management class. Although, we still get a few calls when teachers need some help, normally they are other science teachers. Nate normally takes all of the calls. Our design that emerged in the end of the school year of 2004, was a huge hit. But, now it is getting a little old and we are in the works of launching a new front page.
(2005-2006) My 30th and last year as a full time Biology/Technology instructor. This year we have sophomore Jack Adamson with juniors Ethan Card and Nate Symonds all returning Web Warriors. This is Nate and Ethan's' 3rd year and Jack's second. We've been working on more and more productivity. This year we are using our SQL database along with lots of .php pages to do Blogs and Forums along with other new and cool features. I've been podcasting my Biology class info as well. Our goal is to have a new look before the spring when I retire.
It looks like Physics teacher and Math department Head, Todd Busse will be taking over the web management crew. Best of luck to you all. It's been a fun trip.
As a result of these fine efforts our site has been reviewed with distinction by a number of excellent global Internet companies. Please browse through our kudos! (At this point I've stopped adding to our kudos page, but it's a good archive)
I some times spend too many hours on the weekends here "tweaking" the site. Case in point... I'm writing the bulk of this on a Sunday evening! I do, however, spend one full month each summer away from my computer and the web site. I very much look forward to that time. Oh well, here is more important information regarding our site...
We began with Mac HTTP (the precursor of WebStar) then progressed from WebStar 2.0 to WebStar V. We are currently using an Apache Webserver and Mac OS X Server (Tiger). We use some CGI (Pearl) scripts; specifically "Formmail" that allows us to send the data from a form to "sendmail" and out to a specified address.
...Web Server Hardware
Evolution:We began using a Macintosh Centris 610 at a blazing 20 MHz. Next came a PPC Workgroup server at 110 MHz followed by a bondi green G3 tower @ 350 MHz. After the G3 Tower we made the switch to a G4 @ Duo 450 MHz which we unboxed on 2 Oct 00. We lucky enough to currently be running a PowerMac G5 dual 2 GHz. We are connected to a T1 via fiber with a 1000 base T connection from my classroom.
Actually, most of this information is historical. We have used MacWebCam for years but have switched to SiteCam served on a separate G3 via an SVHS camera streaming video and using JAVA applets. Also when we switched to the G5 we retired our old camera and we are currently webcam is a iSight. We are now on our 2nd iSight as the first one died after 2 years of 24/7. The software we use for the webserver side is EvoCam. Currently we are trying other sources for our ScienceCam site.
We also use or have used, Java Chat for our chat server (and BlueChat) but have none operational yet. Soon to have our chat functional. Additional we have used Eudora Mail Server 1.3.1, Mac DNS 1.0.4, email.acgi, Mondo Mail, and now Mac OSX Server features for mail, FTP, and a ton of others.
For web pages we have used Dreamweaver, BBEdit, Claris Home Page and my favorite just plain html code via TextEdit. Currently most of our teachers use Contribute to work on their web sites. Looks like Contribute and the new iWeb from Apple's iLife suite will be the WUSIWUG choices for web pages here for a while
For graphics we have use Fireworks 4-x, PhotoShop 5-7, Graphic Converter and ImageReady. We've tried tons of things and keep looking for the magic bullet. For quick and dirty editing, Graphic Converter wins hands down.
About
your WebMaster... Gary Lorenson. In addition to this "hobby" of mine
I teach a full load of LIFE SCIENCE classes. I'm also what is called a Technology
Resource Teacher (TRT) for our district That means that I help colleagues out
with computer/technology related problems in my free time (what ever THAT is).
I work on this site on my own time. I received no extra stipend nor time FOR
THE FIRST 6 YEARS. Since 2001, I have been given one class period to work with
students and the web site. And it's been great.
I receive no extra monies for equipment or software; I have no budget. I mostly rely on the kindness of folks in our district like the late Eric Jensen and Dave Yancey. Eric truly had vision. He is the one who put Wenatchee School District on the global technological map. We've been on the bleeding edge ever since. Hundreds of teachers and thousands of students have been directly effected by Eric's efforts. Districts nationwide use our models for technology developed by Eric. I'll never forget Eric's contribution to me and our district. Eric retired at the end of 2002 and lost his battle with cancer the fall of 2003. I'll (ton's of us) will miss him very much.
Thankfully, Dave is still here and very supportive of our efforts. Dave continues to make ground breaking decisions that keep our district running smooth and on top at all times. He is clearly dedicated to the highest quality of technical operation and of his people. He is the glue that has kept us as one of the most technologically literate (and uptime productive) in the state/nation.
My other involvement's have been developing and teaching technology classes for the University of Washington, helping our local educational service district ESD171 with Internet classes, working with US West/WEA The Learning Space project as a selected cadre member, and with a multi district Science/Math grant from OSPI regarding technology much like the project worked on with CPB/Annenberg and EWU. I was also a trainer/participant with "Collaborative Math/Science Projects with the Global Community" grant with Eastmont, Orondo, and Wenatchee school districts. There's tons of crap that I've been involved in using technology and biology. Too much to bore you with here. If you are really curious, check out my vitae below.
Since 1999, I've been pretty quiet and am focusing more on my own children as well as my WHS kids. Brian Behle and I took 20 kids to Costa Rica to work with sea turtles for a week during 2000 and 2002, but my global contributions have been scaled down a bit. I'm still innovating with technology but keeping it closer to home @ WHS.
In the spring of 2006 I will have my 30 years in and will retire with a grin on my face and the wind in my hair (whatever hair that is left) at the top of my field. It will be my 17th year @ WHS, and my 12th year as your WHS WebMaster. What comes next is a mystery to me, but I'm excited to find out.
I love teaching Biology, Anatomy, and Web Nerds... but also love skiing!