Avoid Back-to-School Blues

Quiz time! Question: What would delight a few bad students, but spell doom for today’s high-tech school systems?

Answer: An IT meltdown.

Learning can’t wait for expensive and labor-intensive IT work during the school day. And a server room is no playground. Mark Candalor, the technology coordinator for the Kane Area School District in Pennsylvania, had a eureka! moment when he realized that foul weather could wreak havoc on the systems that support his school. “Our A/C unit in the main server room sometimes trips breakers when there is a lightning storm. Rather than wait until someone comes in and finds the server room hot in the morning, I want to know right away if the A/C isn’t working,” says Candalor.

So how did this savvy technology coordinator make the IT honor roll? He studied up, purchased a Temperature@lert sensor, and developed a backup plan. “I am using the Temperature@lert to send a text message through email to myself and my assistant if our server room gets too hot. This was the simplest and least expensive way I could find to achieve the goal,” he says.

As any teacher will tell you, intelligence pays dividends well beyond the classroom. “We haven't had a lightning storm since we installed it,” says Candalor. “But we are looking forward to not cooking our servers in the future.”

Candalor earns high marks for his techno-smarts. His Temperature@lert report card gets a big A+ from us!