Skyward Update for Students and Families

All families and students should of received family access to Skyward by now. If you have not received a letter for your child, please contact Tracey Heeney at theeney@cencam.org. Families will be able to access all of the child(ren)’s information with one login.

Student login information has been given in class. If they did not receive the information, they can click forgot password at the main login screen and a notification will be sent to their school email.

The Skyward Mobile App has also been activated for our district. You can go to your mobile app store on your device and download the Skyward App. Once you download the app, you simply search for Central Cambria in the District Name area and then login using your username and password. You will also need to set up a passcode for security purposes.

Once you are logged into Skyward, please update all of your contact information to include all guardians, address, phone numbers and emergency contacts. This will allow us to have the most up to date information available.

Jackson Elementary Music Department Newsletter

Click here to view the Jackson Elementary Music Department newsletter for October 2015.

Jackson Elementary Veteran’s Day Video Project

Jackson Elementary will be creating a video program for Veteran’s Day 2015.  We are looking for pictures of members of the armed forces from families of Jackson Elementary to feature in this video.  If you would like to provide a picture, please send it in with your child by October 9th, 2015 to give to Ms. Douglas.  Please include as much information for the picture as possible including the name, rank and any other information you would like featured with the picture.  We will return all pictures.

iXsystems Donates 1U Server to Pennsylvania High School for Website Redesign Project

Creating our School’s Website (on Linux)

Bonjour le monde!  My name is Andrew Regan, and I am a senior at Central Cambria High School in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania.  I have been a fan and supporter of open source software for quite some time now and I enjoy listening to internet webcasts like Jupiter Broadcasting’s Tech Snap series.

Last year, Nathan Belsterling and I designed a website for our school’s chapter of the National Honor Society and entered it into Pennsylvania Computer Fair 2015.  Together we earned third place in Pennsylvania for the web-design category.  After coming home with a third place medal, we heard that our school was looking to have their website redesigned.  Then, an idea struck us – we could design a new website for the school district and enter it into Pennsylvania Computer Fair in 2016!  That week, we wrote up a proposal to redesign the school website and gave it to the high school principal Mrs. McDermott.  I didn’t think much of the proposal until after a few weeks into summer when I got a call asking if we could come in for a meeting with Mrs. McDermott and the  superintendent, Dr. DiLeo.  Nathan was busy working at a summer camp, so I dressed up in business attire and prepared to answer all of their questions.  The meeting went well and they loved the idea of creating a new student-designed website for the school district.  They gave us approval to present our plan to the school board during the August meeting.

As we prepared for the August school board meeting, I started looking for a quote for server hardware.  Being a fan of open source software, the first company I asked was iXsystems.  They come highly recommended from Jupiter Broadcasting as a company that supports and contributes to open source projects – mainly FreeBSD.  In my original request, I only asked for the price of a rack mount server, but they did much more than give me a price.  I told them about our project to redesign the school’s website and about our plan to enter the new design into the Pennsylvania Computer Fair, and they offered to send us a free 1U rackmount server!

You can imagine our excitement at getting to present the offer of a free new server to the school board along with our proposal!  It was both a frightening and exciting experience to present our project to a room full of people, but it turned out to be well worth it.  The school board approved our plan and applauded us for a great presentation.  A few weeks later, iXsystems sent the new server to the school where we got to take it home and unbox it!  At the time, we really didn’t know what we were getting, all we knew was that it was a 1U rackmount server.  As it turns out, iXsystems gave us a really nice machine!  The server is a quad-core Intel Xeon processor with 32GB of ram and two 1TB hard drives setup in RAID.  After we opened it and hooked it up, it only took us about 10 minutes to install an operating system on it.  After running it for two weeks, it seems to be working just fine!  When the site is ready for public testing, the server will be moved to our school’s server room and it will be used to beta-test the new site.

Thanks iXsystems for the great new server!