VTSD Tech News
December Edition
A Note from the Tech Guy
As we near the holidays it seems everyone is hitting their stride in the classrooms! This is a great time of year as the students are ready to learn and are very engaged. We get the opportunity to cover a great amount of curriculum and to also integrate lots of technology!
If you are feeling comfortable now that we have hit the 2nd marking period and are ready to try a new technology in your classroom, don't forget that the tech coaches, media specialists, and tech teachers are always ready to support you in your technological endeavors!
And now, on with the tech news...
What is happening with Power School!?
As you all know we have had some problems with Power School recently. I had a conference call with the Vice President of Engineering - he shared the following:
- VISTA EQUITY - You may or may not know that Power School recently changed hands from Pearson to a company called Vista Equity. Apparently Pearson was not keeping up with infrastructure updates in the final months which has caused Power School to be susceptible to DDOS attacks - these attacks flood their data center with traffic and crash their servers.
- HANDLING ATTACKS - Power School has been rapidly upgrading their protections against these attacks. As of now they can mitigate the attacks within 15 minutes (but that still means 15-minute periods of down time). They anticipate a more permanent fix in December which should avert DDOS attacks altogether.
- WHAT ABOUT THE SPEED? - To further address their infrastructure issues, Power School is switching to a new data center (Rackspace) in January. This should hopefully address multiple issues including the speed of their site.
- WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY FAIL? - If Power School puts all of this in place and we still continue to have these issues then we will have to consider more drastic measures. One possibility would be to host Power School inside our 4 walls again which would be expensive and time consuming. The second possibility would be to leave Power School altogether and consider a new Vendor. I would prefer to NOT do either of those things but only time will tell.
I apologize about the issues with Power School and thank you for your understanding while we wait to see if they can truly improve their services.
CHAMPION SPOTLIGHT: Tina Kellish
On top of the regular tech curriculum, Tina found time to pilot a K-4 blended learning program (Easy-Tech) and even teaches the Walnut Ridge students how to code using Bee-Bots (simple programmable toy bees). Thanks for all your hard work, Tina!
College starts here...
CM 2A
Music Production
UPCOMING TRAINING
There is a special county event being hosted by High Point Regional on Monday, January 18th! They are hosting their 2nd annual Google Summit and all educators are invited to attend for free! Click the link to find out more!
In MyLearningPlan now:
12/3 - Schoology Groups for PLC's, Activities, and Clubs (online)
12/8 - Make & Take: Kahoot vs Socrative
12/10 - Google Classroom: Class set-up, file management and new features
12/15 - Creating Instructional Videos with Screencast-O-Matic
Our old tech coach, Tina Bacolas, who is now at Park Ridge shared a recent webinar she did for Schoology in case you want an extra training video with tips and tricks.
Keep an eye on MLP, more workshops will be announced soon!!! Don't forget, if you would like a one-on-one with a tech coach, just schedule time with Janet or Jackie via their Google Calendars!
Hour of Code coming - December 7th-13th
CODE.ORG - https://code.org/learn This K-6 friendly website has lots of great tools to introduce students to programming with fun games and animations!
KHAN ACADEMY - www.khanacademy.org/hourofcode Khan academy joins the hour of code movement with tools to draw, design webpages, and learn databases for ages 8-18!
CODE ACADEMY - www.codecademy.com/courses/hour-of-code-en/0/1 Code Academy has also prepared some starter tutorials for grades 6-12!
DID YOU KNOW: Emailing big attachments won't work!
If you need to share a big file, picture, or video try uploading it to the "cloud" (google drive, dropbox, etc) and share the link.
VTHS: Celebrating 40 years
Quote of the Month...
"In fifteen years we will be teaching programming just like reading and writing...and wondering why we didn't do it sooner."
- Mark Zuckerberg
VTSD Tech
Email: mshea@vtsd.com
Website: www.vtsd.com
Phone: 973-764-4272
Facebook: facebook.com/VernonTwpSD
Twitter: @VernonTwpSD