Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Field Trip

We had the opportunity to visit Moorings Park this week for a field trip.  This was a wonderful opportunity to showoff a diverse and complicated network to the students courtesy of an old colleague of mine.  Moorings Park is now supported by the company that I belonged to before I started this little adventure with the school system.  Aaron Gruber is the Staff Consultant in charge of the network along with three and a half other full time employees.

My students got to see the Network Operations Center as well as the server and cabling rooms.  They got to see the blade servers in use and well as CAT7  (yes, that is right CAT7!) cabling.  We discussed the fiber infrastructure as well as the need for future planning.

Aaron even let us watch him change a port on a switch from one VLan to another.  While that may have put my mother to sleep, my students thought it was better than Showtime after Dark.

But as Aaron so precisely put it, IT is so much more than just switches and servers.  Aaron exposed my students to much more than just servers, racks, switches and phones.  We discussed other technologies that the department is responsible for including security cameras, nurse call equipment and a personnel locational tracking system.  Pretty cool, huh?


But I think what elevated Aaron in the eyes of my students from awesome guy to near demi-god was when he showed us the theater that was recently built for the use of the residents.  This place boasted the most advanced technology available today to create a facility that is unrivaled for playing movies, hosting lectures, and even producing video.



 After playing around with the automated lights and shades, Aaron let the students play around on the stage while we recorded them on the blue screen for editing with the TriCaster equipment:
 


 Finally, Moorings Park was very generous to donate a rack to my program here at iTech.  I look forward to using this in the classroom for my networking activities.



Thank you Aaron for a wonderful and educational day.  I'm glad you like your job. You have an excellent way with the students and I wouldn't want to compete with you for my job.  :)

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