Tech eNews topics for April 23, 2015:

Topics in this Tech eNews topics for April 23, 2015:
1. Planning for 1:1 work at WHS & EHS
2. Thank you to course instructors and organizers!
3. JMS Parent iPad night
4. Reply all means ALL!
5. NCCE - great ideas coming back to support staff
6. Phishing attempts - new ways to get your info!
7. Picking a great password and keeping it secure
8. End of year surplus
9. School Dude for Technology Work Orders
10. Remote filtering for student mobile devices
11. Wireless changes coming soon!

1. Planning for 1:1 work at WHS & EHSAs the district expands the 1:1 into grades 9 and 10 next year, staff at Excelsior and WHS will be receiving Chromebook devices to begin to learn how these devices will support their work next school year.  A group of teachers met last Spring and through the Fall to evaluate a number of different device options, and after reviewing all options, they made a recommendation to get Chromebooks rather than laptops or iPads for the 1:1 at the high school.  Teachers particularly liked the small form factor, the keyboard, speedy startup times, and seamless integration with our Google Apps for Education system for sharing files between staff and students.  Funding for this project is provided by the voter approved Technology Levy. 

2. Thank you to course instructors and organizers! A huge thank you to Jay Bennett and Kristina Wambold for teaching ongoing professional development this Spring.  Jay taught courses for teachers on the Google Apps for Education.  Kristina taught courses for teachers on using scripts to extend Google Classroom, automating functions like grading, and also courses to support our classified staff.  A special thank you for Sandra Goza for organizing and coordinating the classified Google classes, which have been a tremendous success!  Thanks Sandra, Kristina, and Jay!

3. JMS Parent iPad night Parents of students at Jemtegaard Middle School attended an evening of learning about the iPads and ways to help students be safe online on April 23.  Jemtegaard teachers Kelli Dizmang, Cherise Marshall, and Rebecca Bohlin worked with students who served as "experts" to develop modules that they then taught to their peers' parents using the iPads, and showing parents how the iPads are supporting teaching and learning in the classroom.   Kelli also leading a parent session on online safety and concerns, helping make sure parents have an awareness of monitoring student activities online, as well as tools and strategies to help them make sure their kids are learning to be good digital citizens while staying safe online. 

Thanks Rebecca, Cherise, and Kelli for all your hard work organizing this! Also thank you to Betty Gable and her daughter Natasha for helping with food and logistics. Parents had a great time and reported learning a lot, as well as being amazed by how much the students knew and could do. 

4. Reply all really does mean ALL!When you read an email that was sent to multiple email groups instead of just a select few individuals, you want to avoid using the "Reply All" feature when responding.  If you know all of the recipients, and you are sure that everybody included will need the information you are passing along, then it's ok to use "Reply All".  Otherwise, please always only "Reply" to the necessary recipients. You can find this by clicking the downward pointing arrow next to the reply button.

If you are getting messages as a result of someone accidentally using "Reply All" and you want to stop seeing them, you can "Mute" that email thread.  This option is under the "More" menu just above the message.  Use caution with this feature, as it will archive all future responses to that message thread, keeping them from showing up in your inbox.  

If you need to send an email out to several email groups, you can actually place those addresses under "BCC" which would not allow the recipients to automatically "Reply All".  They would still have the ability to manually add all of the groups to their response, but "Reply All" would not be an option.  Please consider doing this if you send emails out district wide.  

5. NCCE - great ideas coming back to support staffA number of your peers attended the NCCE conference in Portland in March 2015.  The sessions and workshops they attended will provide ideas and topics to bring back to share during next year’s Tech Inservice Day.  Jason Blaesing, James Bennett, Rebecca Bohlin, Kelli Dizmang, Lisa Leonard, Hillary Marshall, Andy Schlauch, Nicole Simek, Kathy Scobba, and Philicia Weaver all spent two or three days attending classes, workshops, and keynotes that shared a wealth of ideas about ways to use technology in the classroom to support learning and teaching.  

6. Phishing attempts - new ways to get your info!As always, there are a number of ways that folks up to no good are trying to get your information!  Many of you are aware of people claiming that you’ve won the lottery in another country, even though you didn’t enter it, or asking you to send them a “down payment” and you could have millions! There are many, many schemes going on to try to get access to your bank account, e-mail accounts, and your hard earned cash.  This type of activity is called “phishing” for information. If you get an e-mail that doesn’t sound right, or asks for your password or login info, please don’t send it back.  Be a wary web surfer and e-mail user, and keep an eye out for offers that sound unbelievable; they probably are!  

7. Picking a great password and keeping it secureUpper, lower, letters, numbers, symbols, what diabolical sadist came up with these rules for creating passwords?  We just want to get logged in!

Everyone knows that our WESPaC passwords need to be kept secure - they provide access to confidential student information including health, discipline, and grade data.  But, now that you can retrieve passwords for just about every web service you use, including WESPaC and EDS, via your e-mail, it’s more important than ever that you have a strong e-mail password, and that you keep it secure.  Coming up with a great password is sometimes a very frustrating experience.  

Here are some ideas on creating a great password.  Use a favorite song lyric or book title as the starting point, something with 4 or 5 words.  A phrase like this will make sure your password is long enough to meet the requirements of the various systems we use. Next, add some capital letters, and change at least a few of the characters to a number. Something like A Tale of Two Cities can be aTaleof2cities which is a really hard to guess, but still easy to remember password.  Keep in mind that details about you that are easy to find, like your address, date of birth, or names of family members aren’t good starting points for a password.  

Another important note is that you should not use the same passwords for both work and home use.  Ideally, you’d have at least 4 passwords that you use on a regular basis.  You should have a strong password for your access to WESPaC and E-mail.  You should have another password that you use for signing up for online systems for work, but which is not the same as your WESPaC password or e-mail, so that if that system gets hacked, you don’t have to worry about your confidential work data being compromised.  Finally, although your tech staff are incredibly trustworthy, we don’t want to know the passwords to your online banking, Amazon.com accounts, investments, or other online systems you use at home.    

It is also very important to make sure that you are safe guarding these passwords, and that you don’t have them on a sticky note next to your monitor.  While we like to assume that no one would ever use this kind of information for nefarious purposes, these things do happen!  Please don’t keep your passwords written down in your work space. Once you create a great password, keep it safe!

8. End of year surplusThe district has about 6,000 items that have tags on them that we are tracking for inventory.  The yearly state audit shows that we’re doing a pretty good job keeping track of these items, but one thing the auditors noted was that people are holding onto really old stuff.  If you have old, unwanted equipment in your classroom that you no longer have a use for, you can use the surplus process to get rid of it.  Your building’s inventory designee (Darlene Enockson at CCMS, Deborah Mansfield at Cape, Marlene Leifsen at Gause, Kathy Stanton at Hathaway, Debbie Leifsen at Jemtegaard, Deana Degrande at Excelsior, and Misty Young at WHS) can help you process paperwork to dispose of the item appropriately, and remove it from your classroom’s inventory.  There will be a surplus run in June, near the end of the school year.  Please work with your inventory person now to make sure you don’t have to hang onto those old items another year!

You can read more about the inventory and surplus process here, including finding forms to dispose of equipment.
http://www.washougal.k12.wa.us/inventory

9. How does using School Dude help you?Besides keeping your tech staff happy (and who doesn’t want that?), using SchoolDude to report problems with your technology helps you! Once you’ve put in a request, you’ll get an automatic e-mail response letting you know it’s been entered. The system will update you whenever Sean, Linda, Becky, or Mat makes any changes to the work order. You can log back into the SchoolDude system to view the status of all of your tickets, which can be helpful if we’ve given you steps on how to resolve something. The SchoolDude system helps the district track time spent on problem machines. Also, if you’ve been having a problem with a computer, make sure you’re keeping track of it in School Dude. Problem machines are identified by the number of tickets assigned to them, and get replaced when we have the opportunity.  

To get started, visit the “For District Employees” page on the WSD Site, then click “Technology/Maintenance Requests” in the sidebar.  Contact your building tech support or Les Brown if you need the submittal password.

10. Remote filtering for student mobile devicesMat Hutton has worked on changes to both the wireless network and our Barracuda web filter over the past few months to allow us to provide remote filtering for all of the district iPads that go home with students in our middle schools.  Remote filtering will also be applied to all devices distributed to students at the high school as part of the 1:1.  While no content filter is perfect, doing this provides students and families with access to the internet but safeguards students from inappropriate content. 

11. Wireless changes coming soon!The number of devices on our wireless network continues to grow at a very fast pace.  The number of wireless clients we provide service for has exceeded 1,700, and next year will be well over 2,000.  While we have a pretty robust wireless infrastructure, your Tech staff are working hard to make sure that we add capacity before the need hits, to help make sure things run smoothly.  We have added capacity to both the JMS and CCMS wireless networks, and are investing in the wireless network at WHS to nearly double the number of access points, working to ensure the 500 new Chromebooks will have wireless access next school year.  Funding for this project comes through the voter approved Technology Levy.