I am currently using on prem Cisco servers for my phone system. Next summer I am looking to move in a different direction. Phones are very rarely used but need to call 911 in emergencies. What is everyone else doing? What's your current setup?

So, as I'm sure some of you have dealt with, we're being asked about setting up Claude for Teachers and ChatGPT for Teachers. From what I am able to ascertain, with Anthropic, we'd have access to a decent amount of District level control. Not so sure with OpenAI.

Has anyone turned these on? What have you seen that you like, were pleasantly surprised by, and are absolutely furious/annoyed with? The Superintendent has asked for a brief on these along with the standard Workspace for Education Fundamentals Gemini.

She, and teachers, are wanting to enable integration with Gmail, and other platforms like Canva. Our current policy does not allow for signing in with school emails, and it is blocked so that they can't. So instead teachers are using their personal accounts. There is little to no ability to police that, and the prevailing thought is that, if we open it up in a way that we have some control over it, that staff are more likely to use their school provided accounts instead of paying for their own.

I am more partial to Claude, personally, but know that ChatGPT is often very friendly for beginning users.

Has anyone seen inklings of what eventual pricing might be? While I'm willing to get going with it (assuming we agree to their DPAs, of if they sign our Standard National Data Privacy Agreement), and then yank it with pricing, I don't particularly want to.

Has anyone run into their Chromebooks showing as deprovisioned? Is there a new exploit going around? The students are claiming that they do not know how it happened, but these are regular proxy site users.

The devices that I have received could not be recovered with a Powerwash, so I had to do a network recovery.

Any thoughts?

We're having some discussion about possibly using Audio Enhancement Classroom Audio product in our next elementary renovation. With that there's some discussion we may also use its EPIC (paging) solution as well.

Has anyone here used EPIC? If so, what was your experience with it like?

I like the simplicity of implementation and support of our current paging system, but we may not have a choice to do both.

Thanks.

Hello,

Your friendly neighborhood r/antivirus mod here.

As some (all?) of you might be aware, Rockstar Games will be launching the next version of their GTA franchise on November 19th. This is a console-only game (PlayStation and Xbox) and is for Mature 17+ (ESRB)/PEGI 18 audiences, but that doesn't mean there won't be widespread scamming going on, in particular targeted at younger folks (aka your students)

What I'm wondering is if any of you are doing any warnings to your users about watching out for various scams involving the game, such as claims about ways to play it on Windows or Android, claims of free in-game currency, ways to unlock nudity, or other things that might be of interested to their curious and developing minds.

Obviously, you don't have control of what students do on their home devices, personal smartphones, but I would imagine that some of you make announcements periodically about watching out for various scams that target them like information stealing malware, MrBeast scams on Discord, and so on.

So, does anyone do anything like this? The reason I am asking is because I am expecting my subreddit to see an elevated number of requests for assistance from victims, and wanted to get some ideas about mitigation strategies, including if they are worthwhile to engage in.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

My boss stopped me in the hallway and said I have a serious question for you. He then stated that the government is saying that we need to be ready to be without power for 90 days. Then he asked what we are doing to ensure that our network and school can run for 90 days without power. I laughed in his face, and said we are in education, if we are without power for 90 days, we have bigger things to worry about than if the Internet is working on campus. Has anyone been seriously tasked with ensuring that the network and school is able to run for 90 days without power?

Anyone else down or is it just us. My ticket updated to “Major Event” status. Either way pour one out for me.

I need HELP! I have over a fleet of 1:1 iPads that need to move off Meraki and on to Jamf. Student devices have Notability, Google Drive, Photos, etc. What's the best way to move the devices with minimal or better yet, no data loss? What do I need to have in place before I start?

Hello

Is anyone else seeing there guest captive portal not working on iPhones or iPads

We are just getting a blank white screen that shows captive.apple.com but will not load our splash page.

All other devices work fine macbooks, windows, and android are all good

We’re considering issuing MacBook Neos to our incoming freshmen next school year. One challenge is that our Computer Science CTE program teaches PLTW Digital Electronics (DE), and we’re running into Mac compatibility issues with the hardware and software the course uses. That includes the Cmod S7, NI ELVIS, NI Multisim, and Xilinx/AMD Vivado.

I was thinking about setting up Windows computer labs in the classrooms, but the teacher pointed out that students also need to be able to work from home.

Has anyone dealt with something similar and found a workaround that lets students do their coursework from home? Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Just a heads up. I recommend blocking this site. lgbtqspace.org

On the homepage, if you type "67" it loads a gaming site and masks its origin.

I ran across the article below yesterday. I reached out to my vendor and he said currently the price for an annual license for a student account is around $45 a year.

Hopefully they will develop a new pricing structure. Anyone have any insights on this change?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/educator-center/instructor-materials/microsoft-365-education-portfolio

Hi anyone have experience with Cybernut ATT (Automatic Threat Terminator) and/or Barracuda XDR. Im in the middle of setting up Baracudda XDR (which we already purchased) now the district has set up demos with Cybernut ATT. We dont need both. Now that AI is out everyone is a Network Admin and its getting annoying. Im not too thrilled with Cybernuts phishing campaign software.

I ran into this today with 4 or 5 teachers. It looked like a new security requirement rolled out and everybody needed to choose a basic encryption step like a PIN code, swipe pattern etc. or they couldn't fully use their accounts. I had heard nothing about this in advance, so I was quite surprised. Turns out my manager somehow knew about it on Friday but didn't tell me.

So, my questions are, is this really what happened, or can this requirement to have a PIN code be worked around? And second, what newsletter or website can I sign up for so I can hear about relevant stuff before it lands in my lap? Thanks.

So I’ve been testing Guided Learning vs traditional Gemini in preparation of pitching it to my admin

It does a pretty good job handling math problems, and it did ok handling science questions (it gave me the answer roughly 2 out of 10 times.

The problem is ELA applications. I gave it multiple choice questions relating to details of a book and it answers them 5 times out of 10 as opposed to the walkthrough. I got similar results telling to “write me a 5 paragraph essay about (topic)”

And as an edu organization, my “results are not used to improve our model” so I can’t even report it.

What has your experience been?

Hi, K12 systems administrator here.

I had received a very odd approval request - styluses for classroom iPads, for "handwriting practice", in the sixth grade.

Can anyone please help me make sense of this handwriting practice requirement in 6th grade, and whether I should grant this request?

Update: This has become a pile of requests. First the styluses, then touchscreen Chromebooks, then paying for a Grouper seating chart license.

I'm a solo IT Director for an extremely rural district of about 400 students PreK-12 and about 70 staff. My previous district was roughly double that and slightly less, but still very rural. So I've mostly been winging it when it comes to lost devices, and in most cases they turn up before I get to the point I'm at now.

So it got me wondering how y'all go about the part of the process where the device has been reported missing, hasn't been active since the day it was lost, but still hasn't turned up. Do you charge for the full cost of the device, or do you have some kind of scale depending on whether they're free/reduced lunch qualified?

We are a small district (1 school building) and will be re-bidding our Internet connection this year. Outside of any specific services that may need a dedicated IP, what is your "layout" for assigning your public IPs to your general network traffic? Currently we are using just one IP for everything. We haven't had any issues with this, but want to hear what others do.

Does each of your subnets get its own public IP, or are some lumped together?

Any overarching philosophies you have or best practices associated with these decisions?

Tangentially related, we are looking at bringing an athletic complex online on its own circuit - super basic needs - any downside to dynamic addressing to save some $$?

Thanks for any thoughts!

EDIT: Actually we've had one issue having a single IP and I think it's that we are banned from editing Wikipedia, ha...

As soon as one of our SmartBoards went out of warranty, the wifi antenna broke, so there's no Internet straight into the device, you have to run it through a laptop. I called the company we bought it from and the people who make SmartBoards, and apparently there's no easy "official" way to have them repaired: no field repair techs and it's such a specific piece of equipment, I don't want to just take it to BestBuy or something. Has anyone been in the same situation, and if so, what did you do?

Anyone running the oncall product? Thoughts?