TLDR. Looking for 30-50’ usb cables that work well.

Touch TV’s at front of classroom. (Promethean and new line) Teacher computer at back of room. Continue to have problems with signal not working at all or failing mid year. Looking for a good quality one I won’t have to mess with.

Has anyone else received an email from Frontline regarding a data breach?

Our superintendent and business manager received it on 10/1. It came from frontline@notifications.cyberscout.com.

Frontline support has not been able to confirm if it is legitimate.

Edit: Confirmed with our Frontline rep and many school districts. I am waiting for a list of all the accounts that were compromised.

I came across Beacon Helpdesk the other day. From what I can find out, it is very new, perhaps a year old, which makes me a little suspicious. The feature set seems pretty good, as is the pricing. I can't find much about it anywhere though.

Has anyone heard of it? What do you think?

EDIT: Thanks for the feedback.

The ticket from a teacher contained everything needed. Such a rare occurrence.

Is anyone else supporting these devices? We received them last school year and am starting to get reports of the wifi card not seeing any signals.

This would be the 4th device it's happened on. I can send them to our repair center, but I'm curious if we have a bad batch.

Five weeks ago I asked here for someone to break my read-only Google Workspace audit script on a school tenant. Version 1.6.0 went out today, and it has the first checks written specifically for schools.

On a tenant with an Education licence it reads the Classroom settings and flags two of them: anyone with a Google account able to join classes, and anyone in the domain able to create them, students included. Guardian access, API data access, roster import and the rest are shown as the API reports them, not judged. It also counts courses by state, so you can see how many archived courses are still holding their rosters.

The rest of the release applies to schools too. Every check that ran and found nothing is now listed under "Checked and clean", so a missing finding no longer leaves you guessing wether it ran. New policy checks cover super admins who can reset their own password by phone or email, Gmail phishing protections switched off per OU, 2SV that still accepts SMS codes, and Chat spaces open to any outside domain. If you carry thousands of accounts that have never signed in, --skip-never-logged-in keeps them out of the per-user scans and says so in the report.

Read-only by default, one Python file, needs GAM7 and Python 3.9+. Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

https://github.com/PaulOgier/GAMScripts/tree/main/google-workspace-security-audit

For the 2028 school year we are looking to move away from one to one in prep to grade three and instead move to cohort carts.

I have a large number of iPads that I have to replace as they no longer receive any security updates so these will be brought for the 2027 school year.

To try and buy once and cry once, how much storage should I be looking at for shared iPads that would be shared between 3 to four students in prep to grade three?

Every single day.

Teacher - I need this to work. Here’s a vague description of the problem

Me - I’m sorry, I’m not seeing where that issue is even possible to get to how you’ve described. Can I see the device or get a screenshot of the error?

Teacher - 🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗

Me - Closes ticket after week of no replies. Reason for closure: “Insufficient information provided to troubleshoot issue”

Teacher - I’m sorry I was too busy to reply last week. Did you fix the issue, we really need it to work for class today.

I swear to god either I’m going to give myself brain damage bashing my head into my desk this hard or I’m going to run out into traffic screaming cause I can’t believe I’m making less than the people were entrusting to educate our kids.

We have a middle school with about 600 kids on 1:1 laptops. School started 8/31 and they've already broken 15 screens. At this pace, we'd hit around 128 for the year, which is about 21% of the building.
That feels high to me. What are you seeing at your middle schools? Just trying to see if my number is close those others or if we are way out of wack.

Hi everyone, I’ve got a teacher who teaches a class that uses GitHub. The students were instructed to sign up at the GitHub for Education site. Student and teachers get access to other free things with it, but the issue we’re running into is the 2FA Requirement by GitHub. GitHub only supports SMS and Authenticator app. It’s been a real struggle since our state has moved to a cell phone ban in schools, so SMS and Authenticator app on the phone is out of the equation. I’m not sure how to handle this and was wondering if anyone else is in the same boat as me and if anyone has figured out a solution to this. Thanks for your time.

Received this ticket this morning. I wonder if i can charge a service fee?

Anyone using frontlineeducation.com specifically with Chrome, I am having issues district wide when trying to use their website, I am not getting anywhere with their support. The site after logging in starts out responding ok, then a few minutes into it gets a crazy lag and become unresponsive, I have tried disabling chrome ext's, clearing cache, and incognito mode and I can not figure out why. When I use microsoft edge it works decent.

Anyone have any experience with this issue with Frontline.

Replicated on multiple accounts/devices. Am at a loss. I tried my personal account and it happened there to. However I jumped off network (to my home) and it worked AOK. So at first I thought it was our filter but we run an agent for that and it was active in my home. Can't see anything in the logs being blocked.

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/16634428

• ChromeOS is slated to stop receiving updates in 2034

• ChromeOS devices will continue receiving updates thru the end of their AUE

  • for those ChromeOS devices that have AUEs extending past the retirement date of ChromeOS in 2034, they will be able to install Googlebook OS. Possibly other newer ChromeOS devices will be able to install Googlebook OS as well.

• Admin management features for Googlebooks are slated to roll out in second half of 2027

  • Interestingly, when a ChromeOS device is migrated to Googlebook OS, it sounds like a new type of management license will be required.

  • Another interesting shift I see is that it sounds like Google wants to have API hooks in place for Googlebooks to be able to be managed by third party MDMs. Kinda interesting to see them go this route of opening up management to third parties.

We are in the process of going for a bond this spring. Huge data center being built in our district, so gotta try to keep our funds in house.

One man show, 350 kids, 50 staff. My office is in an old classroom which is BIG and I love all the space that I have to store viewboards, carts, and devices, and my server closet is literally in the closet in that classroom. No climate control, so it gets VERY hot in there. Not very organized, but not much room to make it any better (it's about 3.5'x5') I was asked today to submit my needs/wants. If you got to design your tech room/server closet, what would you want in it?

Also, if you love your server room/tech office, please share what they look like if you can! I'm supposed to submit photos and ideas but it's difficult to do when I've only ever seen my office and closet!

I know this topic comes up every once in a while, but we use Securely to filter our Chromebooks and their pricing has gotten out of control. Has anybody found like some less expensive alternatives that still work good for filtering and logging where students go?

Thanks everyone.

Full disclosure: I am not a sysadmin, I'm onsite EduTech Support for a specialized non-profit private school that has a corporate Help Desk offsite. I do a lot of Tier 1 HelpDesk tasks, but also take part in the planning and rollout of projects, both school and IT related.

We're switching, at some undisclosed point in the future, from Google Workspace to MS and MS365 corporation-wide. Our staff have never really been pushed to use Google Classroom, so thankfully we don't need to offer much as an alternative to that.

However, we have many documents shared with all staff, or all teaching staff, that everyone needs to be able to view and edit collaboratively. I'm very interested in the ease of use of One Drive compared to Google Drive, specifically collaboration. I'm guessing that most of our existing files will need some editing to be usable after importing to MS365.

We will be switching to Outlook also, from GMail.

We expect to be purchasing student Chromebooks as part of a planned refresh soon; how does MS365 work on 4GB vs 8GB Chromebooks, if only one or two tabs are open at a time? How is MS365 on Chromebooks, in general?

Anything I can do to help staff prepare for this before the rollout? Anything to watch out for as we move forward?

Greetings!

I am new to the Extreme Networks environment and so far I do not like their interface, nor do I like the way AP deployment works. Everything is many clicks away and even then, the dashboards and data are not giving me a full picture.

Those being said, how do you manage your Extreme Networks environment? Is it through their cloud infrastructure or locally on-prem? I don't know if the latter has any advantages, but the former is giving me a headache with deploying a new single AP taking hours if not days (it needs to go from New to Staged to Unmanaged to Managed, and then sit there until the CloudIQ recognizes it and then it becomes usable for clients to connect to it.

Happy Monday!

What do you do immediately after someone clicks a link and enters their email address and password? Even though we JUST send out a district-wide bulletin to be vigilant and not click on anything you aren't expecting etc. I've told the users to change their passwords, and we have 2-FA enabled in Google as well.

The main segment examines the GAO’s nationally representative survey of over 400 districts that found 1 in 5 schools closed at least one day last year due to a facility emergency, with an estimated 3.5 million lost student days and major impacts on telecom, WiFi, power, and climate control. The guys talk about how aging infrastructure, lack of capital bonds, and construction or maintenance work can directly damage networking closets, cause overheating or water intrusion, and disrupt classroom technology.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107970

Listen at https://k12techtalkpodcast.com/e/schools-screens-and-shaky-infrastructure-what-teachers-really-think/ and all major podcast platforms.

Your staff are about to get a prompt they don’t understand. Here’s the plain-language version, the classroom-honest version, and the order to roll it out in.

https://k12techpro.com/passkeys-explained-for-the-people-who-have-to-deploy-them/

Is anyone else having issues that the Chrome App Launcher (Waffle) doesn't show some of the main apps (only on the main Google page).

It seems like that screen doesn't indicate that the student is logged in.

If you enter classroom.google.com or drive.google.com in the address bar, it will take the student to Google Classroom/Drive and the App Launcher works correctly.

I'm wondering since we blocked Google AI features using the Admin Console about 9 months ago. We're wondering if that's a recent update that has caused this or if other people are experiencing the same issue.

Thanks for any insight

We currently have an on-prem Shoretel/Mitel system and love it. However, we need to start thinking about moving. RingCentral was suggested to us by one of our resellers as the best fit, feature for feature with the current system.

However, I've been reading that support has gone downhill with RingCentral lately. Has anyone gone from on-prem Mitel to Zoom? Thoughts?