Outside the Broward County, Fla., Public Schools administrative offices, the air shimmers with heat, the sky is hazy with humidity, and by 9:00 a.m. the air already feels stale.

The air inside feels quite different.

Head past the first-floor desk with attendant behind glass who directs visitors to their destinations, past the warrens of gray-walled cubicles, down hallways lined with cardboard boxes filled with report cards ready to deliver to schools, and into a small conference room. There, the air-conditioned air nearly buzzes with enthusiasm.

That's because in the room are gathered the Broward County Public Schools' eight key players responsible for a four-year, $400 million effort to redesign education through the effective and innovative use of technology. Each of the eight seems eager to begin, to share their stories of how they are turning a school district that operated with some systems as old as 30 years, running on an old AS400 mainframe computer, into a leader in technology.

Broward County Public Schools, with 264 schools and more than 275,000 students, boasts 39,450 permanent employees and is the sixth-largest public school district in the nation. It has an annual budget of $4.14 billion, with more than $100 million of that designated for technology.

"Typically, schools use blackboard and chalk," says Vijay Sonty, CIO of Broward County Public Schools and administrator of the mighty budget. "We wanted to take a new approach, to reinvent education."

With that in mind, he and the rest of the Education Technology Services team created a four-year plan--an Information Technology Blueprint--that outlined 82 projects.

Now two years into the program--and with nearly 40 of those first 82 projects fully completed as of press time--the team can confidently predict completion of the projects at the end of the projected timeline.

In fact, the success of the program seems nearly guaranteed, in large part because of one of the projects implemented--a project management process created by Microsoft and Pcubed and heavily customized for Broward County schools.

The initiative, called Project Management Office (PMO), allows Sonty and his team to easily manage the various and often-changing ed-tech projects. District administrators can track projects via a web-based system to see exactly where they stand--what percentage of a project is complete, who is responsible for it, the date it started, the date it is expected to be finished, and so on.

Since the implementation of the PMO, more than 90 percent of IT projects get finished on time, says Becky Schmaus, PMO manager. "Before that, it was a lot less," she says, drawing out the word "lot" to indicate just how few projects actually met their deadlines.

The PMO is just one of the dozens of innovative projects in Broward County. The district reportedly operates the largest video conferencing network in the world, with more than 350 interconnected conferencing systems--at least one in every school. Each school building also has wireless internet access and laptop carts, and the district operates its own virtual middle and high schools, which have enabled it to bring home-schooled students (and the funding that accompanies them) back into the fold. What's more, administrators have access to a wealth of school and student data, and teachers have access to lesson plans and curriculum content, through a single sign-on portal.