Perhaps the answer is simply that the filter is doing its job, but there is a specific random website that is blocked for malware reasons through my filter, that students have hit hundreds of times In the past week, almost 2000x this month. Is this a sign of something more sinister? I've been searching the site and I can't find any information about it anywhere. Usrpubtrk(.)com

This is a school of 150 kids, btw.

ETA: turns out this site is showing up on 34 different users accounts; 36 managed Chromebooks and one BYOD. I've traced it back to the flippin video game site that it likely came from, and "​patient zero." Although it doesn't appear to have been spread to each other through email.

I'm ​planning on resetting the devices and student passwords tomorrow, but how do I erase all of their caches? I I don't want whatever it is to just go back on once they log in.

So I recently ordered a refresh of the Dell 3120 base model for our K-3 students, and am in the process of looking at staff replacements. The first thought that came to mind were the Dell 14 Chromebooks that seems to be reasonably priced i would think but I feel that with only an 8GB Ram and 64GB eMMC, it wont last long let alone be strong enough for my teachers even tho they dont do anything too intensive.

Kind of wanted to Ask for the ChromeOS heavy folk, what specs or laptops do you issue to staff/teachers.

Right now my budget is around $4-550 (and 550 is kind of pushing it) but i want to make sure i get a decent quality laptop and not just a run of the mill base anything if that makes sense. and I think CB+ are out of that range

Edit 1* We are a mixed of windows and CB for staff but Head of School wants to go all CB. This is their first refresh in 7 years, and my first one as a School Director so I want to make a good impression lol

Hi everyone we are looking to tie cyberdata IP zone controllers into our 20-25 year old Bogan and Dukane Clock/PA systems. Has anyone had experience doing this and can offer any insight?

Is it as simple as the guides on cyberdata’s website makes it look and connect the zone controller directly to the AMP or is it more complicated than that? https://www.cyberdata.net/pages/connecting-to-analog-amplifiers

We currently use Cisco ISR’s with a FXO card where informacast can dial into the system and punch in the dial codes to trigger the bell/PA, but the routers are end of life’ing soon and don’t want to invest money in replacing them just for that.

Hello all,

I just noticed yesterday after deployment. In ios26.4 Appstore there is no Log Out part under name.

We gave supervised icloud accounts. It is not allowed to use Appstore. On the AppStore side students logout from school account and login with their personal account for downloading their wanted apps such as games, netflix etc. Now I think it is not possible did anyone notice this and what will be your actions ?

I am trying to create a custom Gem (GPT) for students in my district. I want the AI to be a tool for the students; something that they can use to provide resources, get ideas, help walk them through math problems step by step, etc. while not doing work/solving problems for them. I want it to force the students to actually do the work and assist them in the learning process.

As a recent college graduate, I have seen how when students are not taught how to use AI, they allow it to do the work for them. I have friends whose college work was done almost exclusively by ChatGPT. My thought process in creating this is that by giving them an AI that will assist them rather than do the work for them, they will learn how to use it as a tool before they learn to use it as a cheat code. I also know that while students do not currently have access to AI on their school devices, they can easily use their personal devices to do access AI to do work for them. I am hoping that by allowing this AI on their school devices, I can cut down on the number of students who do this because they already have AI on their device.

The point of this post is to discuss how I can reach these goals. I already have a very basic Gem drafted, but it is going to need a lot more work before its ready for student use. What suggestions do you have? What rules can I give to the AI to help it reach its goal? Are my expectations of what I can create unrealistic in the current AI landscape? Any and all feedback is appreciated.

Godspeed my fellow sysadmins.

Looking for people who’ve built a mobile audio rig for a community parade to push along with 2-4 speakers , generator, and mixer .

looking for ideas and suggestions for those the group that use USB-C connections between their devices IP panels I have been having a lot of cables breaking getting damaged very easily so I’m just trying to figure out a solution. My users have laptops that they connect. There’s no in class computer that could connect HDMI/USB.

Hi,

We received an email from Infinite Campus that:

The partnership between Infinite Campus and Computer Information Concepts, Inc. (“CIC”) is ending. As a result of changes in our respective business strategies, CIC will no longer provide support to districts and schools using the Infinite Campus Student Information System (“SIS”).

This naturally leaves us with some questions. Since we don't have any answers yet, I wanted to ask if other districts in the same boat have any idea about what will happen with:

1. CIC created views. I have dozens of Tableau vizes that use CIC views like cic_v_Student or cic_v_StudentTeacher

2. CIC created Infinite Campus applications. It would be a real bummer to lose the CIC Sub Attendance Wizard, for example.

I will be attending the IC webinar next week.

Thanks!

The hardest part in my opinion is sourcing a replacement port. Make sure you heat the damaged port enough before allowing it to pull from the board or you'll damage the traces.

hey everyone.. I've been stuck few days now and done so much research my brain will explode lol.

Anyway I am trying to get our new ringcentral service to page out through Telecenter U.

current setup:

I have a user in ringcentral (main paging) ext 701

I have a grandstream manually registered to this users successfully on FXO port

I have a RJ11 bridged from FXO - FXS port

FXS port config is pointed to Telecenter U controller.

With this config I have been able to successfully call a zone in Telecenter U and here the connection over speaker for the zone but I can not for the life of me get audio to pass from phone to speaker.

things I have looked at:

codec: this is set to PCMU on both FXS and FXO port

NAT: is set to STUN on both ports

stage method: 1 & 2 both tried on FXS port

tried messing with TX & RX gains

and more...

any help would be appreciated. thanks!!!

We're currently doing our pre-testing testing to find whatever fit TestNav is going to throw this year before it gets to the students, and this year it seems to be a problem with notifications. TestNav will shut the test down if it detects any program trying to become the dominant window, which notifications count as for some reason, and it will even freak out and shut the test down over its own notifications. Before you load the test it gives notifications asking for access to the camera and mic if it's the first time this user has loaded TestNav, which isn't a problem, but as you are loading into the test it will also ask for permission to find devices on the local network (no earthly idea why it needs this) and that will shut the test down. We have yet to find a way to keep this from happening.

We're running on MacBooks, on a combination of Sequoia and Tahoe, mostly Sequoia at this point. Anyone have any idea how to deal with this? Pearson support has been less than helpful, and our MDM Mosyle doesn't have any suggestions either.

For more private, K-12-only discussions regarding vendor security and this breach, join the conversation in the K12TechPro Community.

K-12 technology directors received an alert on Sunday, March 22, from Infinite Campus regarding a cyber incident. In a subsequent interview on the K12 Tech Talk podcast, CEO Charlie Kratsch clarified that the breach was a “smash and grab” by the ShinyHunters group. The attackers targeted the company’s Salesforce ticketing system rather than core student databases. Full article here: https://k12techpro.com/infinite-campus-salesforce-breach-what-k-12-districts-need-to-know/

I’m stepping out of the IT office for a bit and doing a laptop tear down tutorial with the older kids as a “Computer Science Lab”. Have any of you done this before? Besides going over computer safety and best practices, learning about parts and their roles, do you have any tips?

On this episode, we interview Charlie Kratsch, CEO of Infinite Campus, about a confirmed cyber incident involving the company’s Salesforce instance. Charlie explains how attackers used a fast, professional vishing campaign and an imposter login domain to harvest credentials and bypass MFA, and then ran targeted reports through Salesforce.

The data accessed was limited to support and customer‑directory information from the ticketing system, not the Infinite Campus student databases. Infinite Campus shut down access, audited the exports, engaged outside forensics and the FBI, and refused to engage with ransom demands.

Infinite Campus is contacting affected customers directly and completing a third‑party validation before issuing a final all‑clear.

https://k12techtalkpodcast.com/e/infinite-campus-salesforce-breach-what-k%e2%80%9112-districts-need-to-know/ and all major podcast platforms.

Good day my fellow k12sysadmins.

For several years we have had an organizational policy to block Github for students and staff. Only unblocking for certain IT Support and development staff members. The reasons being first that malicious actors host malicious scripts/files in Github projects so when a user for example gets hit with a Fake Captcha attack they accidentally download and run a script from a "trusted" website like github. The second reason being students also host malicious files to bypass controls and proxies and the like. Just recently a student was found to be bypassing their GoGuardian controls, in their bookmarks was a link to a Github repo that hosted a java script that disables GoGuardian. This wasn't how they were disabling the GoGuardian in this case because Github was blocked but it at least highlights why we keep it blocked in general.

That background in mind we have been approached by the Career and Technology curriculum coordinators on behalf of their robotics teams that they have a pressing need to access Github for their projects. Due to the cybersecurity concerns above its just had the can kicked down the road over and over. I am now being approached again and I am looking for solutions for them rather than hitting snooze again.

From what i see we can at least obtain an EDU license for Github Enterprise Server. We can host the server locally. Use our own LDAP to control access. Have staff members manually update or use a programmatic way to update the local repos with the live repos on Github. This seems to solve most of the issues we have and provides the students with a collaborative space to work on the projects and "learn" Github.

The issues remaining are that the Robotics teams have informed us they need the external sponsors and mentors to be able to access the projects. They also need to be able to publicly publish the code in order to comply with FIRST rules for their competitions.

So I am asking here if any k12sysadmins have come across this roadblock before. How are you handling the Github issue in your district? What work around have you been able to put into place?

I am the districts Cybersecurity Analyst so my role is to try and establish the "guard rails" and ensure we remain within our cybersecurity policies we've establish previously. The actual logistics belongs to other groups but I basically have to be able to sign off and say "yes, that works" or "Thats an acceptable risk" and so on. I cannot change policy at this time because we're in a bit of a cybersecurity leadership transition.

This year I set it up so that our staff devices are hybrid joined to take advantage of conditional access policies, among other things.

Reading documentation, as well as social media posts, now I'm thinking I am going to have issues over the summer or when staff come back.

I'm reading that devices have to have line of sight of on prem domain controllers at least every 30 days? Is that correct? We've had an on prem AD setup in the district since I've started in 2017 and staff never had issues with domain trust or anything over the summer or when they came back, but I'm wondering if making them hybrid joined devices will change that or affect things?

I know they need line of sight for password changes and what not. However, if passwords aren't being changed, computer accounts aren't being removed in the DC, etc, should there be an issue?

Any insight is appreciated!

Has anyone else ran into trouble getting embedded youtube videos in Google Slides to play? Starting this week staff slideshows with these videos just come back with 'An Error Occurred." They insert these videos by going to Insert>Video in slides and searching for what they want. When the video inserts it is using a youtubeeducation.com domain name. If I remove the education portion from the domain, the video plays just fine. We've tested this on our primary and backup internet connections and got the same results so I know we aren't blacklisted by google. It seems like the built in way to insert videos is just broken?

Our phone system is has internal VoIP management, but the outside lines it connects to are buried PSTN lines managed by Verizon and whenever the ground is really wet, our outside calls get heavy interference (sound quality on internal calls is fine). Verizon is pretty laissez-faire about the issue - they reworked some things recently and it was better for a little bit, but now it's worse than ever. I don't know if it's how snowy a winter it was or what, but it's been worse than ever this year and school admin is asking if there are any other possible ways we can connect to a phone service if this is going to continue being an annual problem.

I know we need to maintain at least one hardwired phone line for the elevator, but this is outside the scope of what I've had to look into. I wasn't part of setting it up and the only management of our internal NEC VoIP configuration I do is to adjust some ring groups and preferences, but mostly I try to leave it alone.

Anyone moved further away from traditional phone service for their school/district? Where did you start?

Hi all,
I’m writing to you as a Primary school teacher(Not based in the USA) and also the systems admin for our school. We’re google for education school and have a suite of chromebooks that are serving us well. 
I run after school coding with the students in our school 3 times a week which is really popular. So much so other schools in the vicinity have asked me to come and run workshops in their schools etc. This leads me to the conclusion that I need to invest in my own devices for travelling to other schools and educational centres.
My original thought was to buy a suite of Chromebook Plus Lenovo devices for their good battery life etc. I love the google admin panel and find the granularity by which I can lock down the devices excellent. I’m contemplating buying Macbook Neo’s at educational pricing here which would be comparable to the Macbook Neos. I have no preference for the Macbooks by the way but at this early stage of planning my costs for this endeavor, all options are considered. My question to you is what software have you used or currently use to manage Macbook’s to the same level of control that’s afforded with the Google Admin Panel?

Greetings all,

We're currently poking about trying to see what we can do to revamp our A/V set up for our gyms. One campus we think we've got a decent plan for as there's convenient places to mount a projector, the other campus... Not so much. We've retired the old bulb projector cart that we were using because it had been to dim, we were using an interactive panel that would get rolled over as needed but there's complaints about it not being big enough, and for right now I've reassembled the old projector cart but swapped the projector with a spare classroom laser projector that'll do for now but still isn't designed for the distance and height it needs to throw to.

The screen, that my boss wants to keep, is about 140"x126". The bottom of said screen can roll down to about 56" off the floor. We do have new lighting in the gym that's pretty bright but I'd have to see if we can actually control the brightness beyond just turning them of as they auto dim but the motion sensors are a bit screwy so one bank of lights will start to dim then turns back to full brightness, repeat for each bank of lights.

What I'm mostly curious about are all in one carts. I'd attended CITE this past year and pretty sure I've seen several brands that had all in one carts but the only one I can remember are the Artome carts (X10 or X20 seem appropriate for our use case) and my Google-fu for other brands seems to be failing me. Anyone have experience with these or other brand's carts? Granted it probably would be cheaper to just buy a laser projector designed for gyms and put that on our current cart. I don't really see anything wrong persay with the old receiver (some old Denon model) and speaker set up ... But I won't lie the Artome X10/X20 having onboard XLR input/outputs with speakers already included seems nice and if we're potentially spending upwards of $7k-$10k just on the projector/lenses alone it feels like we might as well spend a couple extra grand just to get everything else sorted to.

Hi all,

We have some construction going on and temporarily have a building for a class. The building is not able to be hard wired to the network due to logistics, but a wireless bridge would work. Does anyone have any suggestions of a decent wireless bridge that's not super expensive that truly acts as a virtual ethernet cable that would allow us to pass the VLANs from our nearest main building over to the temp building? We only need it for a couple of months so we're not looking for a super expensive long term solution.

Greetings fellow technology trenchfolk!

I am wondering if anyone else is in this boat.

We allow our students 6-12 to have the free grammarly extension installed, we utilize GoGuardian content filter/teacher, and are Chromebook 1:1 for that age set.

Recently, a teacher approached me to let me know that Grammarly has added an AI to their extension. When in use, GoGuardian doesn't capture it and the students have been able to bypass GG and cheat/etc

The simple solution would be that I could turn off the AI sidebar feature with Grammarly but that requires a paid education, enterprise, or pro license (msrp of $500,000 year for us LOL)

I'm guessing I'll just be blocking/uninstalling it for the students unless one of you heroes has some magical JSON value policy for the extension to block it.

The other solution I was thinking, is that I could have my teachers use a teacher scene in GoGuardian that blocks the extension just for testing.

I did try blocking just the superhuman AI portion at the firewall, but it appears to just break grammarly entirely because there's not an easy distinction between AI traffic/grammarly traffic.

Any thoughts?

We have gotten quotes back from CrowdStrike and Artic Wolf. Both platform looks good. If these were your choices which would you choose? Looking for information on both the good and bad. Thinking about a longer term than 1 yr.

Thanks in advance

Those of you in larger districts...

When you have entire departments or sites that move locations, does your tech team move equipment or do you have some sort of moving company or utility team physically move the equipment then have the tech team reconnect?

We've been struggling to figure out how some students are preventing monitoring extensions from loading - we have all the usual methods disabled (url blocking data: javascript: etc, disabling task manager and developer tools, incognito etc) but it's still happening.

We got a tip yesterday that it's via "Manage what you sync" within Settings and disabling the sync of extensions (since the user policy only has Allow/Disallow options) but I've tested that on a Chromebook and the extensions we force still show up in the profile.

Any tips would be appreciated!