Tech Facilitator meeting May 2011
Barbara Sasso, Susan Rose-McBride, Carolyn Martin
First, I am thankful for all that Barbara, Susan, and Carolyn have personally done for me over the years, but more importantly I am so proud of their almost 100 years of combined service to young people. They will be dearly missed!
Betty Weycker not here…today
Marlo--Retirements--Caroline Martin, Barabra Sasso, Susan Rose-McBride
Other news: Barbara Sasso-Synder was recently married!
Charlie Cole: NCWISE reminders:
- Remind teacher to check the box in NCWISE--"delete assessments at Year end"—it's under setup options, and preferences--usually checked, but double check to make sure it is…
- Middle School: Remind to put EOG grade in:
- EOG Counts 25% of their grade final grade in Middle Schools
- Look on web-portal for a clarification sheet on this proces/Dr. Weycker presentation (here is the link to that presentation)
Presentation from Betty on the webportal for tech facilitators
- Working through printer inventories at the moment
- Printers added to the network (such as lead secretary) is for monitoring purposes not necessarily for others to print to
- Next year will print by memberships in active directory groups
- Inventories will be determined by first of June
- Lots of printers in the building—no plans at this time to take those away. Overall, It’s a cost savings initiative.
- Printers are renamed—first step in the process
- For toner already in place—going to inventory—print management company might purchase it back—to try and recoup the cost.
- We may have access to Print auditing software: which will give us the ability to monitor reports against machine name and user name.
- Printers without network cards—certain ones you will still have to order print cartridges.
- What do you do with the empty cartridges? Kevin may work with a recycling company, and make a little money.
- Question?: What about all in One printers that some use mainly as scanners? Will be a printer by printer decision. It could be that at some point Dr. Martin will say all printers will have to go?
- At this point, they are just trying to inventory.
- Kevin Suggests you “burn out” cartridges and not replace right away (he may have said that slightly wrong when first announcing the program
- Over time, the Shipping time frame could decrease a little
- Question about printing report cards? In elementary schools (3,4,5th grades will Data Managers print?—Kevin will look into that question)
- DOT is compiling the survey to determine how many access points, etc—will be installed sometime during the summer, then wiring will be bid out, and installation of access points will be done by DOT staff.
- Encryption: starting to change to the WPA—based on a certificate pushed down by group policies. Have completed SE, Glenn, Reagan…will start with other schools who have chosen to re-image the laptops
- Teacher laptops have to be pulled in…re-imaged--will also update the current trend anti-virus client, and Service Pack, WPA will not run without SP3
- If you can label laptops with teacher name and COMPUTER NAME—they will rename and rejoin to the domain.
- Re-image teams will be going out in mass as fast as possible.
- Carla will send you a schedule—will try and give a weeks notice.
- Carla needs laptops in a central location.
- Dell mini’s--they don’t have to touch them.
- All the older Lenovo’s from laptop carts do need to be re-imaged.
- The "take a away"—We know teachers have difficulty bringing them in.
- They are talking about laptops moderls--R40-s up, not been able to get A30’s to work
- Desktops Machine in your trailers that are wireless --Carla needs a list of those.
- Carla will send an e-mail with all the details.
- T-61 are good for this year…?
- From now on, you will see "WSFCS_wireless" instead of tsunami under wireless properties.
- Carla will have a band of college temp people starting soon
- Carla will be e-mailing you today about Surplus inventory—sending a college truck around to pick stuff up…
- TV’s they will not take. Kevin says that he is going to ask the land fill.
- DOT has spent time to make some space for their new "virtual servers"
- They are geared up and ready to start:
- Over the next couple of weeks, they are going to roll over one school completely to a virtual server.
- They have tested at Career center.
- They Can start Data move in an afternoon (Office Data is primarily the data they are moving) and move to virtual server in a few hours.
- Printers will be assigned through active directory groups
- They are looking into giving us access to us to assign printers.
- Please make sure teachers make backups of their data--If it’s valuable, back it up!
- Question? Email—anyway to easily back up?, you can archive in lotus notes, but what about i-notes?
- Suggestion from JIM M.--You can Install Cute PDF writer and when you hit print you can save the e-mails as files.
- K drive will be available again in the fall—They have already moved it…so…
- You may not have to back it up (but would not hurt)
- They are moving to "employee number" and active directory teacher passwords may have to be reset...could be a default active directory password to start out next school year.
- Active directory is currently tied to social security number and they are moving away from that.
- Issues--Many teachers whose H drives that are loaded, and as a result are saving to desktop—Tell them to save to Flash drives!
- New thresholds for server space should definitely be more than 100mb
- It’s the same routine they have been preaching for years!
- Big discussion on external hard-drives and USB drives…There are new items on the price list.
- If computer is in the Admin container --profile sweep will not happen.
- thin client models around
- Have enough 1500 licenses to make old machines Thin clients devices.
- They would re-image old machines with bare bones like windows XP
- They are working with vendors to certify all software that will be pushed with the thin client
- General use labs would be first to get these thin clients, but the teacher machine (especially with classroom solutions) would still have the main computer
- Office staff might also go to thin client since they actually use very few applications.
- If you steal a thin client machine, it’s not of any use to anyone
- WISE terminals, HP, etc. have good thin clients
Conversion to a New Email:
- Buddy Martin is heading up
- Problem is Lotus is running many domino applications—an example -- vacation requests They are looking at new ways of delivering those applications
- Microsoft live 2 edu / CSI k12
- Seriously doubt we will be on the new system when teachers come back in the fall
- Live outlook is a web-based product that people are used to using right now like g-mail, etc.
- As long as they are used to web-based email, there should not be much trouble in this conversion.
- There have been questions? Why are we doing it?
- Support for lotus notes requires 5 servers
- Hosted environment takes care of that
- Users will have much larger space—perhaps more than a GB
- Right now they are managing 10,000 accounts that are managed daily--takes a lot of support
- Active directory will become the e-mail database
- Will need to match up active directory with email user names
- People will keep their e-mail user name and that will become active directory--both will have to be the same, so some active directory names might change slightly
- New platform --we will be able to add email to a mobile device!
- Will data be migrated from old email to new? They may migrate data if less than 100 mb
- No student accounts for now (too many issues of monitoring that)
- Email Probably phased in by December
KACE:
- Similarities: like assist, KACE will use active directory user name and password to login
- Process flow will be similar, still assigned to you as tech facilitator
- Terminology changes:
- customer=submitter
- Technician = owner
- Knowledge Base is Great!
- Simple user interface with fewer categories
- One screen simplifies process
- Software Library tab: will have a list of software that users (even teachers) are allowed to install on their computers.
- My Computer Tab: tells you the name of the computer, all the information about the software and hardware on the computer—great troubleshooting tab, shows all software installed on the computer (can alert you of spyware, illegal programs,etc.)
- Service Desk tan/ Is where you create a new ticket
- Never more than three categories for them to choose from
- Machine tab: use can type in filter box, for example, M406A (it will narrow down the computer…This might be the biggest learning curve—they can copy from "my computer" tab the name of the machine
- Everyone can change the person who is submitting the ticket
- You can search for any ticket in the entire system (open or closed)
- Able to put in a short article, attach files and place links
- Type out a search phrase such as “disk quota”.
- You will now have access to the entire tech facilitator handbook
- When resolving the ticket, you can search the knowledge base and insert the suggestion it in your resolution.
- Will be live July 1 for the front office staff
- Knowledge base will be limited for regular staff.
- Some pages will be limited to just Data Managers for example.
- Christina Cassstevens-promoted to take over Brian Elliot's blackberry position. She still knowledgeable with email and other service desk too
- Here's another cut--Laptop money—10 year partnership has eneded, money has been retracted from WFU ($500,000) (maybe that no more schools get laptop refresh)
- This is part of the 30 million they have been asked to save across the district.
See CL Marshall if you have questions--due in June
Marlo Gaddi--Workshop Planning Guide:
- Connecting to the Standards—all teachers are responsible for teaching the technology standards. http://www.ncpublicschools.org/curriculum/computerskills/
- The teacher evaluation instrument – all workshops will meet those standards
- The guide she is showing will be on Learning Village.
- DOT is offering several workshops on Friday June 17th and Monday the 20th:http://wsfcs.k12.nc.us/cms/lib/NC01001395/Centricity/Domain/32/SummerTech2011.pdf
- This summer, Camp Inspire—for schools that have promethian solutions –link on the instructional page—not for starters—beyond basics. July 19-20 --Available to register for this now
- Webmasters can go to your school tools tab, and under reports see "last modified" by user
- Adding an event to the calendar does not update their website—are teachers being called out?
- Teachers need to understand when last time they logged in—
- There is a board policy that webpages have to be updated.
- Remember the local requirement for tech credit was reduced from 3.0 to 2.0 because they have to keep an updated website.
- Another useful report: “editors by site” shows you how to edit by page
- It’s actually a licensing issue they have to show evidence of updating their webpage--it is their responsibility not yours
- Web-pages need cleaned up over the summer
- Reminder teachers can make pages inactive don’t have to delete pages, etc.
- Webmasters vs Principal (principal is ultimately responsible) But webmaster is also responsible for updating—asking for updates to the webpage at faculty meetings.
- Kimmel Park 97 percent have access…so you can’t really say "my clientele don’t have access so there's no point in updating webpages".
- Summer-time is perfect time to do this
- The update Date is not as important as whether or not the "page is current"
- Last modified is just one way to monitor. At least it is getting schools to look at updated websites
- Policy about a time frame on the webpage? Currently the policy says "timely/appropriate content"—they will be looking at that wording more closely. ((maybe say update weekly?)
- Suggestion--Perhaps have a rep on the technology committee at your school take a look at the webpages and then have them talk to teachers, comes better from them then from you or the principal
Calendar push ups and downs—will get training in the fail
Training for Tech Facilitators: August 15th and 16th??
Email your thoughts about meetings for next year…
No money for subs next year…
