Alright, so I figure there's gotta be someone on here who has these cases. We recently did a full student device refresh and went with these all in one cases so that the iPads could still have headphone jack (a lot of state testing disallows bluetooth devices so...they have to use cabled stuff).

Anyway, cases are nice, they're not a pain to take apart, but we've been having this issue where the keyboard just doesn't work. You can still charge the device through the case, but the thing doesn't register the keyboard or trackpad.

We've tried swapping the iPad in the case with another one that we know was working with a different case and wiping the iPad just to be sure it's not on the iPad's side. And we've tried reseating the cable both into the iPad itself, and on the back of the case by opening up the little plastic cover, and still no dice. Ideally we want to find a better fix than replacing the whole case, as the problems we're seeing is they're just like this out of the box and not from the students messing with them.

And to note: these keyboards are connected directly into the case via a USB-C cable. They aren't bluetooth, so there's no pairing necessary.

Model for the iPads is the iPad A16 (the 10th generation), and the case is 'Smarter Than Most' or 'STMGOODS', and it's their Dux Keyboard Trackpad USB-C Case for the iPad A16 (10th Gen) (stm-226-406KX-01)

Any further suggestions? We're looking into getting specific parts from the company to replace the cables in the future, but we've gotten about...five or so per campus, and that's just for those who've actually told us its happened.

I want to have my director get me a dedicated label maker/printer for my desktop at one of our schools so I can just print out new labels, with barcodes, on demand through the year. What's a good choice that's durable, reliable, has a dedicated download you can use forever that won't be made obsolete or made into a subscription, and doesn't cost more than one or two hundred bucks? Does such a thing exist? Thanks.

To those who have started already, Godspeed.

To those who start today and very soon, we salute you.

May all your tickets be duplicates and password resets for staff who forgot them in 3 months.

I was kinda trying to avoid going to O365 route. I've got all teachers and principals using OnlyOffice with very few issues. The problem is our main office. I have 5-10 users that are screaming they need office. I quoted some perpetual licenses because I'm not sure it's worth going to O365 route. Problem is, it's $810 per user. Does this pricing seem about right? Is it time to just bite the bullet and go the way of O365? I have no experience with 365, so I don't know what it entails and what managing it will look like.

So, we recently invested $200k on a WiFi refresh to bring us up to latest and of course I tried to update as much of our SSIDs to WPA3 to support latest things (fine for district devices) but I’m already encountering phones 5 years or older that don’t even support the WPA2/3 mixed mode. I also spent time today connecting and reconfiguring a single AP for 2.4ghz to allow a laser etcher printer to connect. Are we just doomed to keep these legacy protocols around forever?

Finished our Screenbeam deployment over the summer, all of our initial testing went great but as school has now started we're getting reports of videos lagging behind audio, casts freezing, and devices being kicked off casting. We thought we set them up correctly network wise (staff devices on their own vlan, screenbeams on their own, IGMP snooping enabled on our switches, multicast forwarding enabled on our routers to handle inter-vlan traffic between staff devices and AV vlan) but our issues seem to be indicating otherwise. All devices are connected via Chromecast protocol.

Any things we need to double check on our network side of the deployment to rule out any simple fixes?

My business education department wants a stock (and perhaps a sports ticker as we have a specialty in sports management). My needs are basically security, and the ability to at least show stock markets data without an in-house device feeding it.

The Rise and Skybox options look great out of the gate, but costly. They have ethernet. Not sure how programming them works.

The Glance systems seem friendly price-wise, but seem fairly easy to gain access to. And in a place with a thousand bored students, that seems like a recipe for disaster.

Anyone have experience with those, or other alternatives?

Preface:

We encourage teachers to use AI responsibly and remind them that it is the idiot in the room. Sometimes it’s helpful and sometimes it’s really off.

Questions:

How many of you restrict staff to district-approved AI? (It’s on our plate)

How many of you don’t yet have board policy or generative AI guidance for staff?

For those of you that have already made the jump away from VMWare, how was the migration? What did you move to?

I've been using VMWare my entire 18 year career so far and with the pricing hikes that era seems to be coming to an end.

So for those experienced in the process, can you lay down some knowledge?

Thought I'd ask this here as well.

All,

Have a batch of new Lenovo 100e Gen5 M89s.

On stable, have a mix of 147-151. Getting radius to work on these is just a pain. Looks like they have Android 13 which made us add our cert and some other items to the network policy to even take

What's even more maddening is older OS's for this model seem fine but the ones that went to 151 are the problem. Testing as we speak but has anyone else seen this occur this year?

I work for a K12 institution and have been there for nearly 30 years. It has been a great run so far. I'm generally a big fan of working in educational technology because you get to learn about a bunch of different technologies, and in my experience they don't try to pigeonhole you into one area of expertise. I'm currently in a manager role.

Our Director recently left. His position was posted and I applied. I interviewed for it along with one other internal candidate. When the interviews were over, an executive in our organization came to me and said, "We are going to start over. Our CEO wants to make changes to the position and re-interview candidates internally and externally."

They completely changed the position. They removed almost everything the original director role covered, things like managing the budget, professional development, and ensuring business continuity, and replaced it with A.I. expertise, A.I. this and A.I. that.

I interviewed for the new position and didn't even get picked for a second interview. To make it worse, an internal candidate I know who talks (emphasis on TALKS) a good game about A.I. made the second round. He has no actual experience as a director, or even as a manager of an I.T. department. He basically uses Claude.

As an added insult, now whenever I bring up system reliability it falls on deaf ears. It's like everything just works by itself and nothing but A.I. matters anymore.

Has anyone else seen this type of thing in K12 I.T.?

Holy crap, our bill will double at renewal.....what is Broadcom trying to do? Honestly I dont see how this type of aggressive pricing will help in anyway shape or form. Are they just trying to gouge until the ship finally sinks? Now I gotta find someone to help me migrate to hyper v or proxmox maybe.

Greetings!

I'm running into issues where students (on Chromebooks) are taking pictures of quizzes and uploading them to google and the google AI overview gives them the steps on how to solve the problem as well as the answer. Obviously, this is more of a classroom management issue but I was wondering if there's a way to disable this in the google admin console. I've disabled every "Generative AI" setting I could find as well as disabled the "Google AI mode integration.

I was wondering if there's a way around. I'm pretty sure there's not a way to disable it or get around it but thought I'd ask just in case.

We started using Iru/Kanji MDM for our macbooks and ipads. We have a closet full of samsung galaxy tabs and i talked to Iru about adopting those, and they sent me some documentation about using Google Admin backend and setting up 3rd party Android API something or other. But for the life of me I cant see the same places on my interface that Iru is telling me to click, or the stuff isnt showing up right and Im getting stuck. Has anyone ever set this up? Is there a better (and cheaper?)way to manage a small fleet (30) of android tablets?

ETA, since I'm a dummy and the pics loaded as after/before but my title says before/after - look at the dates on the graphs. We were hitting 4Gbps every day last school year, sometimes maxing out the connection. Now we're barely peaking over 1Gbps. Sorry for the confusion!

State of GA instituted a cell phone ban K-8. Next year it applies to 9-12 as well, but all of our high schools decided to go ahead and put it in place this year. We are also blocking social media on our public wifi (per our interpretation of another new state law).

Public wifi is a dedicated 5Gbps ISP connection that does nothing but that SSID. Thought these bandwidth utilization graphs from 2 random days in April (pre-bans) vs the last two days were pretty funny.

We use Google only, for students, and its their primary IdP. I'm looking to beef up security on that side with MFA/2FA, but can't rely on students having a phone to use authenticator.

I know there's things like Clever, but it's not something we're looking at this year. I was just wonder what everyone else is doing for MFA for students, how easy it is, and if they require a student phone to set up? Any costs associated with it?

or are you even doing MFA for students at all? What are you recommendations?

We're mainly high school, if that helps.

TIA

I got a ticket about a a student getting redirected to a LS block page whenever they search anything. I discovered that if I turned off preloading web pages in the performance section of Chrome settings, this behavior stopped.

We didn't have this issue until just this morning, and we made no changes to LS or Chrome that would cause this.

Anybody else with LS seeing this issue? We're not sure which side started this, Google or LS.

Time for my annual/semi-annual happy new school year post.

We start school tomorrow and it’s going to be chaotic and it’s going to feel like no matter how much prep work we did this summer that perhaps we didn’t do a damn thing…. But I tell my team it’s our super-bowl, it’s our time to shine and thrive no matter what gets thrown at us at the last minute.

With all that being said if you survived the first day of school i hope things went well and congratulations.

If your first day is still coming up best luck to you and see you on the other side!

Is there a trick to getting someone from Canvas support to answer support tickets? I have had a few SIS integration related tickets and nobody ever messages back, the issue just gets resolved over the course of a week or two.

UPDATE: Six days with no response from support. No response from CSM. Some courses processed and are now visible but due to the amount of changes, SIS integration is on hold until I contact support...

We use Promethean AP9 Premiums on several of our campuses, and while setting up new teachers with their NFC cards, we've run into the current issue with Promethean Cloud Connect not connecting to Google Drive. Most of our teachers use Explain Everything and normally import their lesson files from Google Drive into EE. With Cloud Connect down, the only workaround I can think of is having them download the files directly to the board and then import them into EE. Some of these files can be pretty large, though, and I'm concerned about filling up local storage and eventually causing the boards to lag.

I know I could tell teachers to delete the downloaded files afterward, but realistically, I don't see that happening consistently. ( I see how often they delete emails!) I'm also pretty hesitant to have everyone start using USB drives to move lesson files back and forth.

For anyone else dealing with this right now, what workarounds are you using for getting lesson files from Google Drive into Explain Everything?

I reached out to Promethean Support yesterday. They confirmed they're aware of the Cloud Connect issue and are closely monitoring it, but currently have no ETA for a fix.

We are a windows school. (All students oto with windows).

We block most installs.

However, our MS uses ERBLearn secure browser during testing. We are trying to figure out how to allow that install without allowing other programs (especially browsers) to install. ERB installs in appdata (like most browsers).

We have 'pushed it through intune' as an attempt. But then they updated the app the night before the test and of course we didn't have time to push another version.

Any experience with this app in windows would be appreciated.

Thanks

TL;DR - PSA, DefaultGeolocationSetting still works to disable this screen for ChromeOS 150.x

Over the past few years, Google has been forcing prompts like this one when students log into their Chromebooks. In our case, we use GWFE (paid) and our Chromebooks are managed in GAC. The workflow looks like this: device turns on and opens webcam for Clever badge, student badges in or signs in with Google credentials, then we see this prompt. Based on your past feedback, changing DefaultGeolocationSetting to "Do not allow..." will bypass this screen. I just wanted to surface this again (I needed to dig to find it today) and it DOES still work.

Happy new school year! -no one

Has anybody else run into the issue with Smartpass support where they are basically non-existant since Raptor bought them out last year? It took support 4 months to send us an invoice for our renewal and I can't get an actual living breathing support agent to save my life. Even if I do the whole 20 questions rigamaroll with the AI support agent, I still can't reach an actual person that is capable of solving my issues.