As a school looking toward the future, SJA administrators and faculty realize that that a strong technology department is not only an asset, but a necessity in the school of today. The use of technology in education carries both great promise and great responsibility. Therefore, St. Joan of Arc school administrators, faculty and staff join with the Joliet Diocesan School System in the belief that:

• All students should have access to and practical knowledge of as many aspects of today's technology as possible
• Computer education should be integrated into the school curriculum wherever and whenever possible
• Exposure to technology should encompass not only exposure to the sciences, but to the humanities and the creative arts, as well.

St. Joan of Arc has over 200 computers whirring away every day. All of our teachers have laptops. We have two mobile carts, 20 computers each. Each of our classrooms has a SmartBoard and each board is driven by a dedicated SmartBoard computer. We have three computer centers, as well as the library which houses 15 computers. The majority of our machines, except for about 10 Quad-Core Dual-HDD PCs used for Video Editing in the MultiMedia Lab, the two mobile carts (20 machines each) and a handful of new laptops, are generally more than 2 years old and were purchased from the refurbished corporate-refresh market (at less than 30% the cost of a new machine) when they were already at least 2-3 years old. Average cost of these machines was about $180 each. We rebuild them as needed. The original box may be 5 years old but the hard drive, fans or power supply….. are replaced as needed.

The 2011 St. Joan of Arc Dinner Dance and Auction did a call for cash and we were able to purchase 35 new HP Pro, Window 7 machines for student use in the classrooms. These machines are being deployed around the school where needed to replace aging hardware.

All the laptops are set up for wireless networking at the school. The PCs hooked up to the Smart Boards or those which have no access to a wired jack also have a wireless PCI card installed. All computers have the capability to be wireless, but wherever possible we hook them to the wired network.  All the printers are networked via wired Ethernet, as is common practice. All printers are accessible from any computer – wired or wireless since it is all one LAN. All areas of the school are covered by wireless access points. Due to special needs of the iPads, the existing wireless network was upgraded to include an overlay network.

We currently have 6 iPads, owned by the school and 26 provided by The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) & Dist. 202 which are all in student’s hands.

With Software quickly being replaced by web based applications and educational web interactive programming we have all the major Microsoft programs and many utility programs made by lesser manufactures that help manage, maintain and control computer resources. We have an inventory of software for younger learners and subject specific software for Jr. High material. The book companies are also offering software. However, we prefer web based programming.

At the heart of the network is the Proxy Server which maintains a log of all Internet access, successful, failed or blocked. The local files on the student machines are not backed up since they are considered volatile. Students use the RAID file server for persistent storage. Teachers are encouraged to back up their own PC files on FLASH, portable media or the cloud. Computers containing data that is essential are backed up daily to the file server. Cloud drives are utilized for teacher home/school transfer of data.

We currently have three file servers. One of the three is for general file storage use and runs a RAID array. Two run simplex high speed drives and are primarily used for storing large video files for the MMC, and doing daily backups of the Library database. There is one Internet Proxy Server that filters Internet content, logs Internet access, and can be used to monitor Internet access in real time. The remaining server is a Router that connects the three school IP subnets, and acts as a firewall to the Internet.

Our Grading program is Edline, which is a Learning Community Management System (LCMS) that many schools use for school and class organization.

Our website is Joomla, an open source CMS (content management system).

Our Blogsite is WordPress,  a free and open source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL.

Our mass email system is SubscriberMail, a web-based email marketing platform offering sophisticated tools to develop and deliver professional email communications.

Our teacher email system is Google Apps for Education, a free email and collaboration tools for schools.

Our emergency calling system is One Call Now which allows us to send unlimited messages anytime from any phone making our contact with you, the parent, instantaneous.