Saturday, April 13, 2013

Technology Facilitator Meeting April 2013

News from Betty Weycker...
  • Race to the top meeting for Betty in GSO today at 10:00
  • Lenny Schad, from Houston ISD is going to come and spend a day with us about BYOD (Bring your own device)
  • Betty is trying to juggle to get principals and tech facilitators to hear his presentation.
    • Maybe in May on a Tuesday with principals or Thursday with Tech Facilitators
    • Another option would be a a day in May and we would meet in the afternoon
    • tough scheduling this with testing
Changes in staff:
  • Buddy Martin has taken a position in Greensboro and left
  • Offered a position for Kenny replacement who replaced Cory
  • Mike Nesser is still in the hospital (she will post his address tomorrow if you want to send him a card)
  • Anyone here for their first meeting?
    • Cheryl Jeffries, admin assistant for DOT
HOMEBASE refresher course (Power School FAQ)
  • 1) Required items for Power School
    • Some LEA’s are going on May 1st, we are a June 1st district
    • For Data Managers it is June 1st
    • August, all teachers will be on power school, which is why
    • down to 800 teachers who have not activated their accounts
    • SO, now she is sending out individually by school lists of teachers who have not registered for Power Source
    • At end of the week, she pushes out the remainder of the course
    • The rule is if person has current NCWISE account, all those people should get a registration. For power source
    • PRT’s all have different classifications so will depend if they have NCWISE access
    • After Monday, they will start accepting tickets for people who need new accounts.
    • Betty is sending emails with lists of teachers not registered to principals and tech facilitators…
    • "Nothing is optional, nothing is required" -- Betty
    • But in all seriousness, this is the only means of training that teachers will get
      • “if I were a specialists, I’d take these courses while the opportunity is there”—
      • Jackie Pierson—if a Media coordinator never had an account, then they will have to have a ticket
    • There will be a new wave of workshops after June 30th
    • We are pushing it hard now, because teachers will come back in August and be overwhelmed then—at least encourage them to try and take some now
    • Power Source link on the technology department website.
    • Browser requirements for Power Source—not clear on that, try another machine, or another browser.
    • Different designs with different courses (some require different updates)
2) True North LogicMCREL tool is being replaced—another required piece-- at the start of next year

3)     2014-2015, the TESTNAV  (we can’t opt out of it)
Timeline:
  • June 1—Power School (gradebook)
  • Schoolnet—summer replacement for instruction content (learning Villages and the like) 
    • video distribution—could be discovery ed or learn 360 type—they will be available at a cost and we can opt in.
    • Can we see it first in the summer, and provide it in the fall?
      • It’s possible we could move from Learn 360 to the school net if it includes discovery ed (it will depend on the contracts and when they are up and when we have to sign on the dotted line)
  •  Open Class is the Moddle replacement
    • It’s an opportunity and may or may not switch next year?
A couple of GIVENS:
  • You first have to go to ncidp site--NCIDP has  a special requirement
  • Joan has reactivated accounts and reset passwords—should have received an email from Joan.
  • Call service desk/submit a KACE ticket if you need to have password reset
  • If you didn’t receive an email then your password was not reset because it was still an active account
  • As of April 8th, Joan has set up new tech facilitators and new Principals
  • When your password is reset, it does take 15 minutes for the password to take affect!
  • You will receive a lengthy letter in the next few days and how to subscribe to AMTR
  • When you subscribe to AMTR, (if you are new) you have to pick a role (follow the instructions in Joan’s letter!)
  • Joan will upload a folder to the webportal with the letter and FAQ’s--watch for that in the next week                                                         
AMTR FAQ’s
  • Can have more than one tech facilitator linked to a school and both can work on AMTR
  • Can also be linked to more than one school
  • Data is always live, and you can look at it and start updating, clicking SAVE at the end of each section
  • No difference made for leased computers
  • Equipment has to be in your building to be counted--though, repairs still considered "in your building"
  • Needs to be completed and signed off by principal before you leave for summer break
  • Don’t forget to count cafeteria computers
  • Student response systems are counted by remotes—each individual one—NOT each set
  • Questions about classroom solutions--Peggy
  • Do not count computers issues by health alliance (school nurses)
  • School psychologists laptops counted by central office not by your inventory
  • If you would like to use a Sample spreadsheet,  e-mail Joan and she will send you a copy—helps keep up on inventory all year long
Betty, more on Power School
  • Most recent Power School--Identity Management
    • Teacher UID will be their login
      • 10 digit UID used for MCREL—no rhyme or reason to the number
      • NCID is the NC number used for testing, will not be used for power school
      • WSFCS decided to create a third unique id—which is used for your payroll, e-docs, etc.
      • What is important is that teachers/ncwise users when they go to Power School, they will use that ten digit UID number
      • Data Managers will not have a list
      • UID—there is a list—a place you can go to find the number…
        • Let teachers know that’s what is coming
      • Took committee two years to come up with that determination—there was no common thread across the state—that is why the UID.
      • UID, is found in staff development where they go and check their credit
      • Betty will outline in TBT
MLC’s and BYOD’s:  http://wsfcs.k12.nc.us/mlc
  • MLC is a pen name by us for Mobile Learning Community
  • This past year we have had a controlled pilot  with class sets of devices.
    • With the purpose to evaluate the infrastructure, but providing everyone with a device was not part of the plan to date
  • Taking the pilot information, the goal now is to allow students to bring their own device for schools who meet requirements
  • THIS does NOT mean Schools can buy whatever device they want—just because a kid can bring one—We will still have standards....Will we add to those standards?
  • Another goal is for teachers to be instructional coaches in these new situations
  • BYOD is not a 1:1 initiative--1:1 is: "I’m going to go out and buy everyone a device"
  • Discussion of Mooresville  http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3757944  
    • wealthy community with a poor tax base, Tax base of Iredell county is disadvantaged, and that’s why they have a 1:1, the money is there and it’s easy—also only 500 kids
    • They are making tremendous strides there.
    • Discipline improved (didn't have to go far)
  • There is however no way there will be a budget for every student in WS/FCS to have a device
  • The reason for the science laptops is not just to do the science tests, they had this transforming classrooms in mind
  • BYOD is not mandatory
  • April 19th is the due date for the BYOD interest letter.
    • Two different options
      • Can be the entire school or a "collaborative group" in the school
      • Need to have some data about your school--Survey the students, how many students have devices?
      • Betty will not be supplementing the devices of kids who do not have devices
      • The key here and elsewhere like Mooresville is the training
      • Mooresville has been in school administrator’s magazine
  • Betty—The teacher from Rural Hall (Roseanne) —did not have a computer at home—so there is a whole spectrum of people who will volunteer for this
  • They need the three days of training with teachers to get them started in the right direction
  • There will be agreements in place that they will have to sign off on.
    • Must be part of the edmodo group for example.
    • Digital Citizenship:is the key to all of these—kids responsibility, they become the helpers and the best resource
  • Roseann created her own BYOD at Rural Hall (used iPhone when Galaxy Tablets would not work)
  • Parents, admins, tech facilitators have to buy into the concept
  • Lenny Schad when he comes in May—ask him these questions
  • In order to start in August, certain amount of summer training must be completed
  • Second wave will start later -- maybe in December
  • DOT will monitor the usage/infrastructure also will enforce CIPA (Children’s Internet Protection Act)
    • Snap chatting, and twitter and Instagram are social media that teenagers are using not Facebook (Snap chat is an IM sent for 8 seconds and then it is gone)
  • At the start of next year, students will have to register the devices they bring in and only they will be allowed to use wireless
  • Teachers—whole different story—how they deal with them accessing wireless with their own devices is secondary.
    • May have them register, but they would have different access.
    • Will they be able to BYOD or Buy their own and use them?  Maybe, Maybe not
Time allocated for Tech Facilitators?
  • Betty hears more and more about zero time allocated for tech facilitator.  She needs to repeat the survey asking us our allotted time for tech support.
  • Being in a lab all day not being able to provide support concerns Betty.
  • The wave of how we are used has gone up and down
  • "Teaching technology"—Betty has never been a proponent of that
    • There is no common core  just for technology—it’s supposed to be integrated, a tool, a resource.—"It’s still one of Betty’s soapboxes".
    • It was said that tech facilitators should have 25% of their time for tech support
Steven Anderson
  •  Question about kids accessing wireless now on their iPhone?  
    • They had to turn user authentication on again for awhile but will turn off later-- probably change in the fall—they know it is happening.
  • Date for interest forms for BYOD is April 19th—principal has to be trained in TLC (learning in a technology environment)
Workshop Registrations for Power Source Course:  Steven clarified several points in a followup email:
  • Teachers will not be receiving 3.0 CEUs of credit. That would mean 30 hours of training. Teachers are only going to receive 6 courses in PowerSource which equals out to 6 hrs or 0.6 CUEs of credit. We have to list it at the higher amount to keep things consistent. Data mangers will be the only person in your building to receive the full 3.0 CEU amount. Other staff members (Office, Guidance, etc) may have more or less depending on their assigned courses. You can individually audit credits for each participant. Those instructions are found at the bottom of the document found at http://wsfcs.k12.nc.us/powersourceworkshop
  • Remember, only give credits for courses equal to the number of certificates you receive. Certificates are available after a course is completed in PDF form so they can be saved electronically.
  • There has been some question about credits before June 30, 2013. If you have teachers that need the PowerSource credit for License Renewal you will have to create a second proposal that has an end date during this quarter. The reason for that is folks cannot evaluate before the end of the workshop. If they cannot (or do not) evaluate, they will not receive the credits. You can create a proposal for your school that has an end date of, say April 15, 2013. And as long as there is one person enrolled but not given credit, the workshop will stay open and teachers can evaluate. If you do this, add to the title some wording about it ending before June 30. If you need me to change any workshops you have already created, just send me an email. I am happy to do that.
  • They can train for as many courses as they want but are only pushing 6 courses.
  • How do I award credits for individual teachers in workshop registration system?
  • To edit an individual...
    • click on their name of the participant
    • fill out box for credit, total credits, Academic,Tech credits
    • mark box present           
  •  Only person who will get 30 is the data managers
  • Collecting certificates?  Some schools created a folder on the share drive
    • Have them set up a folder on the shared drive and drop them in there
    • Coleen spoke about the end date--By June 25th---If that's the case then can not finish the evaluation until after June 25th, and that may be too close for comfort for the June 30th deadline
Other misc notes from Steven...
  • April 18th open lab for PTA webmasters –8:00- 11:00
  • New apps for Power school, there will be a webinar
  • There is an ability to do a mobile version for all school websites (Talk to Steven about this if your school is interested)
  • IWB (interactive whiteboard) camps/Smart Camp—July 16-18th at Moore elementary
  • Camp Inspire (active boards) will be at Morgan elementary –July 23-25
Kevin Sherrill:
  • Anti-virus—trend micro (was costing us $65,000/year)  moving away from that to  Microsoft endpoint which is part of the current MS licensing agreement
Chris Corbin: New Anti-Virus program coming to WS/FCS
  • Last web-x is not uploaded , so the following is new information for most
  • Project plan for changing out anti-virus (he emailed out this document?)
  • The per user MS license agreement gave us a big savings sharepoint licensing, Office and windows lisencing
  • MS System Center  version of K box agent will updated
  • MS link—MS version of web x—can deploy and be on the new image—will allow web-x type activities  for classroom
  • Forefront endpoint 2010, now called "MS system endpointprotection 2012", will replace trend micro—will be around June 1st (when trend micro runs out)
  • CPM—little blue stop sign will be replaced with a little green box with a shield—so will be called green shield
  • It’s important to know the name "system center 2012 endpoint protection" (so as not to confuse with malware that may pop up)
  • There is nothing out there that provides 100% protection with out shutting down the performance of the computer
  • Malwarebytes is the backup
  • Does have real time protection and manual scans and scheduled scans
  • If green shield turns red, then virus protection is out of date, and you can right click and update
  • Preferred method is to delete files that are contaminated
  • Will be Installed as stand alone product
Phase 2)  uninstall Core protection model Trend Micro
  • Chris will set up a policy on the core protection module
  • Will be done school by school to monitor progress
  • Will start seeing the blue stop sign for Trend Micro disappear
  • There may be a day or two lapse between the removal of old and the arrival of the new green shield—will be installed as a stand alone product
  • Will pull down updates from MS update sites
  • Possible issue in the settings of this new anti-virus—it is set to do an automatic scan scheduled at 2:00 am
    • SO, if computer is off, the next time it turns on it will run on the computer
    • Chris has not seen a change in performance while it’s scanning
    • if it starts to become a problem then he will disable it.
    • They did install on 8305 netvista with 256 MB of ram, no requirements for memory—so this is a good thing!
  • Chris will give us a schedule of when schools will be done
  • Teachers will need to bring laptops back in at some point
Leased Desktops:  
  • have been arriving at your school, most have been delivered now
  • If you don’t have what you need, or more than what you were supposed to have, leave a note with Joan today (very few raised their hand with a problem)
Carla Miller
  • Don't forget that the surplus spreadsheet is due on April 15th!
  • The spreadsheets of the laptops inventory for this school year...please take time to get that to her—She has only 17 returned (Only the part of the laptops that were above the cart laptops is what you have to add to)
  • Also, Create another tab in that same spreadsheet with the science laptops for the new desktops
  • Shoot email to Carla if you are drop short in any location.
  • (48 month lease) "LD", is the naming standard and the classroom container 
Back to the New Anti-Virus...
  • Overall a ten minute operation between uninstall trend and install CPM
  • Question for Chris about informing teachers?  
    • Chris will send a document with a screen shot of the new Core protection module for us to share
  • Image update this summer will take care of this update--it will be on the new images
  • Will also be in AICP
Other Issues:
  • If teachers see pop up that laptop needs activation every 120 days, windows 7—otherwise will have to re-image it.
  • Remind teachers that computers have to come back to the network and log-in
  • The laptop will not work if they don't bring in!  --have to be reimaged after 123 days :(
New Printer Management coming yet again!
  • Starting next school year, gonna start new  printing method
  • They just did finished setting up at central office
  • Printing through policies was "an epic failure" (chris' words)
  • Came up with current method—PMC and printer refresh
  • 2nd generation solution: 
  • Drive maps were done through policy too
  • Another client based method similar to SSO--Client—called WOMAC--Work station management client
  • Also has profile sweep built into it.
  • Client sits on the machine—resides in the root of windows
  • Command line driven
    • Start/run
      • womac/ip
  • TRAC (technology resource assignment console) will replace the current PMC utility
    • You will type in your school code
    • Pulls up computer names
    • Click on the printer name (does not require it be turned on!)
    • It writes files to a file share
    • You will need to know what print server you are using:
    • Type out full path to the printer--such as\\340hprint….
    • Can remove everything then an add
    • Does not un-install any local drives, or any regular network drives
    • but you can Add y mapping for example, Y;\\340data01\516YB$
    • You can filter to look for devices
    • Can you do multiple machine assignments?, not at the moment ? but Chris is working on it.
    • Script running, when a computer is turned on, he is removing the install file and moving it to the install location for womac to read it
    • Should not be a whole lot of work to do at the start of the year.
    • Goal to have all assigned printers to go with womac
    • Potential Problem -- if printer locations change during the summer
    • We will do a couple of web-x’s and an admin guide
    • question? How do you know what print server you are on?
      • Print server will show up
    • At some point, they might possibly break down the printer servers so whole divisions don’t go down at the same time
      • Print server names might change at that point.
    • One way or another there has to be a server at schools to do imaging
Sprint to Verizon phone migration:
  • Principals and AP’s will be notified (about 900 in the district)
  • Cost of the phone program is ~$40,000 / month with e-rate support, is some of this an unnecessary cost?
Reminder about MS home use deal:
  • on the WS/FCS website go to:
    • Departments
    • Technology
    • Wsfcs Microsoft employee home use program
    • Web store—Kivuto is hosting this store
    • Products continually update
    • Office 365 is a web version of office and is sold on a subscription for web versions
      • No purpose in purchasing a subscription when they will have it in the fall
    • Can only purchase these products with a valid wsfcs email address
    • Majority of stuff costs $9.95
    • Can purchase each product 1 time
Wireless Update:
  • Will continue to grow that infrastructure
  • 99% of connections are 100 MB connections
  • 1 GB linked out of your building
  • Access points are wired to the network—on a 100 MB connection
  • Thus, 30 wireless laptops hitting that access point, could be 3-5 MB process in reality :(
  • So, eventually we need to get all access points connected to 1 GB ports and therefore need to add switches.
  • Will start surveying schools
  • All schools also share 1 GB shared on the data center
  • Ncmc provides us the bandwidth and hoping to get 2 GB by the fall
  • Schools applying for BYOD, will start surveying there first
  • They need to know if carts in rooms are not working well in one hallway for example--KACE ticket
Last Project update--Email changes:
  • Migration on our email—MS live edu been on more than  year
  • Hosted through CSI now called encore technology group, they maintain some of our hosting
  • MS is mandating that they house all their web hosting
    • So we Have to be converted by June 24th
    • We will No longer be "live on edu", now it will be OFFICE 365
    • There will be no difference in look
    • But, there will be more apps available
    • Live web versions of office products, cloud based applications that you could use including sky drive/online storage
    • Could get us out of H drive business
    • Could log into sky drive storage and get the stuff on their h drive (students too)
    • Could see a different staff email log in screen

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