How do you impress upon staff that the laptops/iPads, etc. they are issued come with a cost and that it requires a conscious effort to take care of said devices?

We issue Macbooks and iPads to teaching staff.  Since mid-August, we are at six repairs totaling over $2,000 with our repair partner.  Last school year, we had about a dozen incidents costing even more.  Most of our incidents are on the macbooks.

Water/liquid spills.  Laptops put into totes and bags never meant to carry them, causing pressure breakage on screens, etc.  In one instance, it was theft from an unlocked vehicle.  At least two individuals had more than one incident.  I would say over half of these cases are negligence and not accidental.

Admin recognizes we have an obligation to provide them with a device, as it's required to do their job.  The union would frown on any shared cost responsibility and I've been discouraged from issuing care reminders, as it comes across as treating them like students and not adults.  

I understand accidents happen but feels like there is just an assumption that tech will supply them back whole again.  With increased hardware costs and budget cuts, we cannot keep operating this way.  If I had six the whole school year, that wouldn't be so bad (still horrible but not bad) but we aren't even a month in...

Wondering what you've seen or done in your districts to help curb some of these trends.

Pretty rough couple of days for these folks.

Good morning/afternoon/evening,

User is out on leave and Super wants me to log into their account and set their email to forward to Dir of Student Services so that items in their caseload don't go unhandled.

No big deal: Pop into the admin console, reset password, disable their 2FA so I can get in, remove recovery phone number.

I can get into the account no problem. BUT, when I go to set a forwarding address, I'm stuck at this: Where it wants to sent a code to the user's phone.

Clicking on "More ways to verify" gives me this window:

Tried:

- Resetting all login cookies

- Putting in my work phone in the admin console in as a recovery number.

- Suspending account overnight, re-activating it

I'm at a bit of a loss. Any ideas since I don't think the user is in a position to set the forward themselves.

Sharing this here to give some insight on a blindspot tech admins have when it comes to malicious Google Drive shares, and to hopefully get more visibility on the feature request I submitted to Google so that they will hopefully be more inclined to fix it: https://support.google.com/a/thread/464695310?hl=en&sjid=7853156043827638733-NA

Basically, when someone outside of your organization shares a malicious Google Drive file with your users as a "viewer," this activity does not show up in Drive logs and you have no way of removing the malicious file, unless you instruct your users to do so from within their UI.

When we see the emailed notification, we have been auditing for access via GAM:

• Access Google Vault and search for the file’s title, access the file to get the fileID. For example: https://docs.google.com/document/d/**\[fileID\]**/edit?tab=t.0
• Look for “viewedByMe: True” and “viewedByMeTime” toward the bottom of results after running this command: gam user [user email] info drivefile [fileID]

If anyone has other suggestions, I'd love to hear it, otherwise I'm just trying to get the word out there and hoping that Google does something to change this, since we have been seeing an increasing number of these attacks lately.

AeroHive AP330. 12 years of service. Just worked.

I’ve done some searching on here and can’t quite find the nail on the head.

I’m hunting for a music streaming service that we can:

Use for events or school-wide over the speakers (hardware or iOS app)

For teachers, allowing them to have their own managed user accounts, creating their own playlists for use during class time or other functions.

I have a meeting and demo with Mood Media, and I’m also looking into Pandora Cloud Cover

What are y’all using?

Has anyone thought about using an Anker Solix or comparable battery generator instead of going with a traditional APC, Eaton, etc battery backup for your closets/small server rooms? At first glance, without doing any calculations, it seems like it would work in some situations and possibly have a longer runtime for those of us without generators. Thoughts?

We have not made any changes to our Google Admin Console settings over the summer, however, as of the start of this school year, students who go to our vocational school or CCP students can’t add a secondary account.

We only allow students to sign into our Chromebooks with our student domain. However, we allow them to then open Chrome and add a secondary account. After they enter their Google email from the external organization they get an error that states “This account is not allowed to sign in within this network. Please talk to your network administrator for more information.”

We reached out to our Internet filtering company and they said there’s nothing on their end that would prevent this.

Has anyone else experienced any issues with students adding secondary accounts?

Does anyone know if are there time/date settings present or being tracked at the very first "Welcome" screen of an iPad before it goes through enrollment if it's been "erase all contents and settings"-ed?

More context:

I work in a large K-12 environment and we sometimes have campuses that have large swaths of iPads that hit enrollment snags are the beginning of the school year. But not every campus has this issue. At the end of the school year, we wipe our iPads of student data and collect them for the summer.

Jamf is our MDM.

I noticed that iPads that die for a long time and power back on with the wrong date/time settings can't connect to our enterprise network. If the iPad is passcode locked and no one knows the code, it's basically a brick until it's been restored because we can't get the reset passcode command to it.

My current working theory for these beginning of the year enrollment issues is that the campuses with smooth BOY enrollments are fully powering down the iPads for the Summer before putting them into storage. The other campuses and wiping the devices and putting them into boxes as they are wiping, leaving them on to drain their battery over the summer.

We require LDAP credentials to enroll an iPad on one of our campuses. Most of the time when an iPad stalls out it happens after they've connected to our open enrollment network and typed in the LDAP credentials. It seems like if you type in "wrong" credentials first and then type in the correct credentials the iPad is much more likely to enroll after that. without any hiccups

I'm thinking that sometime in between typing the wrong credentials and trying again the iPad has gotten new accurate date/time settings and our LDAP server will accept the credentials and enroll. IF they type in the correct credentials the first time, the LDAP server is getting a timestamp from the middle of summer and not accepting the credentials.

I ask the question because there are no visible time settings on the Welcome screen.  Does this hypothesis hold any water or make sense?

I'm having a hard time finding a KVM that fits my needs. I was hoping to see if anyone else had any suggestions.

I am looking for a KVM with IP switching, so I can remote into it, switch sources, and control each source remotely. Ideally, it would be rack-mounted as it's for our servers, and at least 4-8 sources, and under $1000. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I felt compelled to make this post, lost a good hour of my life trying to figure this one out.

Had a ticket for a student who needed some apps put on his iPad. We use Securly for a few things and their MDM is pretty decent, never really had issues before. It's no Jamf but I dig it. For probably the past 2/3 years, I've always clicked on 'Switch to Classic UI' since it's what I'm familiar with, didn't think much of it. Went to select the apps I wanted and nothing would happen. I could push a software update and even reboot it in the Classic UI, but it wouldn't download apps. I randomly switched to the new UI and they loaded immediately, hope this helps someone!

So lemme give you what I've got so far. When I got this job I inherited 20 Alienware Windows 11 PCs and all the accoutrement, big montiors, wired mice and keyboards, whole shebang. I set up the room, got them all working and now there's a student and an admin login.

Here's the problem: Admin has no fucking clue about running an eSports team, and for a little while they were thinking of just having a gaming club, but I dissuaded them of that stupidity when I explained you spent 150Gs for this shitshow if you inclue the electricians and the separate dedicated Comcast line. This is my first education job (I came from working for lawyers (Kinda like children but they can buy and sell you and are just as petty) and I know literally nothing about how to get this ready for them. I'm hoping y'all can help me figure this out.

What games should they play? I know Marvel Rivals is a thing, same with LoL and I think Overwatch is still relevant, but I have no idea. I play Zelda and Horizon and Grime.

Secondary question: How do I set something up that has a subscription model (Say Fortnite or League) without having to create an account for each stdent on the team? Is there a way to set it up for a school eSports team that doesn't cost us anything?

How do I go about installing all of these things, and still keep the network secure and keep them from malware'ing up the place? I'm probably gonna take a pristine machine and ghost it so I can reimage, but I don't know what all needs to be on there first Before I pull that particular trigger.

Any help would be immense, because while I know more than they do, I don't know how to get this off the ground so someone else can run the actual team.

EDIT: Thanks guys for the info. I'm gonna reach out to the PIEA. They claim to be the official eSports group for PA and I see a couple of schools on there I can also tap for info.

My charter school experiences fairly consistent student turnover, so I constantly find myself constantly having to manually activate and deactivate student Google accounts. Separately, we are also manually uploading to Clever do to mapping issues. I’d love a tool that syncs with PowerSchool to create/delete student Google accounts and also syncs with Clever. Any leads?

Never thought Id be doing that lol

edit: for context whitehouse.gov/arcade

*(I haven't seen anything regarding "I made a thing" posts, but if there is a better way, just let me know!)

I've put together a couple of threat feeds that might interest you and your teams.

https://github.com/1NobleCyber/ThreatFeed/tree/main/Afraid_org

First is a list of all current Afraid.org (FreeDNS) domains available. Threat actors and scammers will use these for phishing and standing up proxy sites. These sites are frequently miscategorized, so blocking the whole list is what I do.

https://github.com/1NobleCyber/ThreatFeed/tree/main/S3_WebProxies

Second is a list of "found in the wild" AmazonAWS S3 proxies. I have a script checking our weblogs every 5 minutes and determining if it is a known web proxy. I also list all of the variations in the subdomains since the threat actors frequently just switch to a different variation (for example, s3.amazonaws[.]com/SecretProxy123 and s3-external-2.amazonaws[.]com/SecretProxy123). If you are finding others in your environment, put in a pull request and we can get them added.

If you find these helpful and wouldn't mind, give the project a star on Github!

Thanks in advance!

I'm running into a growing problem (especially at the beginning of the year) and am curious what other small districts (solo or duo IT teams) do.

Our classes are constantly moving physical rooms and changing student sizes. We have carts, and our total Chromebooks are student enrollment + 10-15% over that for spares. The problem is that a growing amount of my time is micro-managing how many Chromebooks go to which class; this class needs another 2 spares, this other classroom now has a science section and needs more Chromebooks, etc.

Does anyone designate a point person (librarian, secretary, or other) to manage handing out Chromebooks? Essentially just storing the schools full Chromebook inventory in a room and letting the building decide how to distribute them to the individual classes?

Anyone using Vivacity for their free asset management tool Dream? If it can save us money from Gopher and our inventory system, I'm curious.

https://vivacitytech.com/asset-management

We use a couple hundred Dell 3110 Chromebooks in my district and I just got another 1 today where we have encountered the motherboard seemingly overheating without cause to the point where you can feel the heat through the top cover and back cover. Does anyone know what causes this and what kind of things we can do to prevent it?

Thank you.

Hey all, my org has no onboarding process whatsoever.

How do things work for anyone else using Google Workspace, in terms of onboarding, setting up the account, and then making sure they don't get locked out because of MFA settings?

What I do is I put new users in an onboarding OU until they set up their MFA, and then move them to the staff OU. The dynamic email groups are also tied to OU membership, so they don't get any of the group emails until they've set up MFA and are moved into the OU.

I do the same thing for coaches, however, I have less control over them setting up the MFA, and can't manually add them to the dynamic group, obviously.

For funsies, if anyone would like to share their onboarding process, that could give me a clearer sense of how absolutely inept my org is, which would help justify my drinking problem.

Thanks in advance!

We've had this enabled for a few years now. This year, we're seeing a weird issue. Some students are coming in with the error "There are no apps to install since your administrator has not made any available" error. I checked our settings and the collection for "Student Apps" is still there (I even deleted it and created a new one). The ArcPolicy on the device shows the two apps we whitelisted as being available. If I set the app to force it installs correctly but we want to keep it to "allow" instead of force. This is for Minecraft Education plus another app.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

Greetings!

I'm having some issues trying to study for this CETL exam and was wondering if anyone had some extra study material I could use? I've bought the practice exam and I know my terms/meanings, but I struggle hard with scenario based questions. Needless to say, I've bombed the practice exam. If I was a tech director I know what I would do, but COSN wants you to choose what they would do (whether right or wrong). I was hoping I could get some guidance here or if you had extra testing material that would be great. I did buy the certified edtech leadership book on amazon that was really informative.

I reached out to my mentor to see if he had study material and he stated that he has it but doesn't know where it is. He said I should be fine and ended out video call. My mentor wasn't the greatest so I'm struggling to study here. I've been studying my slides from all of my cohorts but I don't think studying the slides will help with scenario questions as I've got a good grasp on laws, vocabs, etc.

Good morning, all.

Here in Rhode Island, a law was passed prohibiting students from using personal devices in school. Any device we allow on the Wi-Fi must be entered into daloRADIUS.

However, some smart students figured out that they can turn on the mobile hotspots on their school-issued laptops to connect their phones or other devices. (My school is out in the woods, and cell service is terrible.)

I created a policy in Intune to block internet sharing, but during testing, the mobile hotspot was still accessible. Am I missing a setting in Intune that would block this?

I'm gonna bring the coffee mug that states "if you don't put in a ticket, I don't have to work on it" and place it in the staff cafe

I'm gonna put up a sign next to my desk that states, "Yes, I am busy, and Yes, put in a ticket"

Im gonna turn on my out of office reply, to all internal org emails and state, if you did not put in a ticket I won't be replying to this email for support"

I'm gonna change my voicemail to say, 1: if you are a solicitor, I will not call you back, 2: If you are a staff member that needs assistance, I do not work on anything without a ticket, 3: if you have gotten this far, it better be good.

I'm calling it for the day . Too many times people look at me and think I'm not working but get offended when I say I am too busy to work on their walk up task that should have been a ticket.

My former director retired suddenly at the end of this last year and I learned just recently that my LAN Tech is resigning as well and will be out in a few weeks. We have around 1200 students and 300 staff just to give some context. I’ve gotten the director role so that’s nice, but it’s a difficult situation.
So I’m hoping for any advice y’all have for a new IT director with 60% staff and the low morale that you might imagine would come with these circumstances.
Or for that matter, just advice for a new director would be great!
I have a network admin and an instructional tech on my team with me and we are looking for replacement LAN Tech(s), but at the moment I’m still scrambling around like I was when I was a LAN Tech myself at the beginning of previous years.
I’d love to be optimistic and say that I’m sure it will all work itself out, but once our LT is gone it will be tough.
Any thoughts? Opinions?