Virtual classrooms took on particular importance to teachers and students with the quick pivot to remote teaching necessitated by the COVID pandemic. Even before that, however, virtual classrooms were being managed by school IT professionals and teachers were using them to extend their classrooms and enhance information sharing and interaction. Like other cloud-based infrastructure in Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
Secure Browsing
Web browsers allow users to select from one of three levels of safe browsing. Each level uses tools to help reduce the potential for risky web browsing. At the standard level, the web browser warns if you are going to site known to contain malware, phish for credentials, or otherwise risk security. Those protection can Read More
Characteristics of IT
When we design IT systems for schools (and for all other organizations), we must address several characteristics to ensure it functions as we need it to:
Cleaning Gary’s Library
Gary is cleaning out his library. Buy his books on ebay.
Elevator Pitch on Caring & Education
Regardless of the outcomes, if your students leave your class: then you have wasted your time… and theirs.
Types of Tests
There are two types of tests that are typically administered to students: standardized and standards based. For IT professionals who are designing systems to administer the tests, there is no difference; devices must be able to establish reliable and secure connections to the servers where the test is housed, user accounts must be created, and Read More
Who Decides IT in Schools?
I’ve seen the requests from many desktop support teams: “Before you add technology to grants, please include us in your planning.” I understand their rationale. They are responsible for installing, configuring, and managing it. It must integrate with existing systems and be reliable, robust, and secure. I would be sensitive to their requests and I Read More
Why Aren’t They Doing the Work?
A colleague asked for an appointment this morning. She wanted to be sure she was properly reading the logs from the LMS. If you did not know, your LMS tracks everything that you do. What you clicked, when you clicked it, and from where you clicked it are all recorded by the LMS. I have Read More
A Story of Updating School IT
The candidate for a vacant technology coordinator position, that filled the role of CIO but also spent a good deal of time sharing the work of technicians during high-demand times. When asked, “How would you respond to the teacher who returned from a conference and asked for help configuring systems to use a tool they Read More
The Challenge of Passwords in Schools
When upgrading the computers in a school that enrolled students in grades K-12, the new technology coordinator did not change the minimum complexity requirements of passwords for the organizational units containing student users. When they first logged on to computers, they were prompted to change their passwords and were met with the complexity requirements. Students in the Read More