Document Management at Blue Valley USD

By Linda L. Briggs

Document management systems usually work quietly behind the scenes, but their effects can be noticeable in many school operations. Good document management can streamline accounts payable processes, make human resources more efficient, and--perhaps most important--improve student services.

At Blue Valley Unified School District in Johnson County, KS, electronic document management using Perceptive Software's ImageNow system has done all of those things and more. The district's goal in adopting the document management system was to improve operational efficiencies; as the system's usefulness becomes evident, Blue Valley continues to use its document management system in new ways.

Blue Valley's educational programs have garnered the Blue Ribbon distinction from the U.S. Department of Education 14 times; student dropout rate is less than 1 percent. Several years ago, the district, which has about 20,000 students, found that paper processes were creating an operations burden across a number of departments, reducing staff productivity, disrupting workflow, and using excessive storage space.

Document management systems work by allowing users to track and store scanned paper documents as electronic files. Such systems can reduce the storage space required to keep years of archival paper documents, and make it easier to find and retrieve documents later. They can also help cut paper costs, since once the system is in place, some papers need never be printed at all: They can spend their lives as electronic documents within the system....

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Cherokee County Uses ViewCast for Distance Learning

Cherokee County School District in South Carolina has implemented new technologies in two of its high schools to support its distance learning courses. The district has adopted ViewCast's Niagara GoStream portable streaming media encoder to capture and encode classes, which are then broadcast to students unable to attend in person....

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50 Districts Adopt Meru WLAN System

Wireless solutions provider Meru Networks has reported that more than 50 K-12 school districts in North America have adopted its wireless LAN (WLAN) technologies, representing some 1,000 individual schools. The company also said that it sees adoption of WLAN technologies accelerating in schools, driven in part by a "growing reliance on mobile computing in the classroom is the need for interactive multi-media applications to support emerging learning techniques and environments."...

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Corel Launches Painter X Curriculum

Corel Tuesday launched a new version of its painting an illustration suite, Painter X. Following that release, the company also announced a new visual arts curriculum at the annual convention of the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA). The first part of the curriculum, called "Digital Painting and Sketching Using Corel Painter X," is now available free of charge....

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NEC Ships 3,000-Lumen Ultraportable Projector

NEC has begun shipping a new model in its MP-series DLP projector line. The latest addition to the series, the NP60, is an ultraportable model weighing in at 3.5 pounds and producing 3,000 ANSI lumens of brightness....

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Sharp To Launch Large-Venue XG-PH70X Projector

Sharp Electronics next month will begin shipping its new XG-PH70X, a DLP-based XGA installation projector designed for large venues like lecture halls and auditoriums....

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Discovery Upgrades PowerMediaPlus

Today at the annual convention of the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA), Discovery Education announced upgrades to PowerMediaPlus.com, the company's curriculum-oriented media on demand system. According to Discovery, the new features add enhancements to the site's usability....

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• JUNE 24-27, 2007
  NECC 2007
  28th-Annual National Educational Computing Conference
  Atlanta, GA

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T.H.E. Journal is currently looking for the following types of articles for future issues and for our eNewsletter, T.H.E. SmartClassroom:

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