Region V Basketball Tech

This week and last week have been now stop action for tech. Going from ASTE to hosting Region V Basketball Tournament, and all the communities that have radio stations to broadcast the games. To start I took something I learned from ASTE and created a Region V Basketball Site: http://sites.google.com/a/mehs.us/basketball/home . The reasoning for creating this site instead of using our own website is that I wanted to reduce the traffic to our network. We bought a VBrick Video Streaming device to stream the games. So we shoot the video of the game in Hi-Def and push the video to their webstreaming servers. So once again the traffic for the games will be directed through a higher speed server. Even with all this traffic being directed away from our local network we are still overloaded due to students, players, coaches and parents using our local network. Rather than cut the wireless, we talked to GCI and asked them if they could make sure the push video stream has a guaranteed 1 Meg through the firewall.

So why did we do this? We did this to provide the parents of students who attend MEHS and parents of the Basketball players who could not make it to Sitka to see the games. We feel that it is important to communicate with those parents in a positive manner, and this is one of those way we accomplished this. Please check out the site, the Video Feed and let me know what you think.

Another thing I took from ASTE and applied right away is the use of google docs. I made a real cool excel program that takes the scores from the games and moves the teams into their proper brackets. This uses some moderate excel code and the use of several worksheets. Just on a whim I uploaded it to google docs. Well google recognized the code and the multi worksheets with no problem. I thought cool now I can dump this on the mehs.us google site and it will work no problems because they are both from google. Wrong, educational domains from google cannot publish google docs outside their educational domain. So I spend several days figuring out how educational google domains and personal google accounts interact. The solution to publishing a google doc in an eductional google domain is to upload the doc to your personal google account and publish the document. Copy the URL and login to the educational google domain, insert a document and at the bottom there is an option for using a URL, paste it there. Then share the document to all the people who need to update the scores. There was a check box that updated the web every time the sheet is updated. So now my AD or Superintendent can update the website with out calling me after every game. So check out the Excel doc I created for the brackets: http://sites.google.com/a/mehs.us/basketball/scores-brackets

SO THANKS to all those presenters who showed me google docs and google sites.

Question to my audience: Go to the Region V site above and let me know what you think!