Tech Notes 💻

Reminders and Updates for the Infinite Campus Parent Portal

Translations: The portal can now be viewed in Spanish, Somali, Russian & Vietnamese.

Absence Requests: After spring break we will be enabling an option for absence requests to be submitted via the portal. This will provide an option beyond our current practice of the absence line voicemail.

Staff with students in the district: Reminder that while your Infinite Campus login may have worked in the past for viewing your children in the system, a separate parent portal account is now required (not to mention being a better practice for account security). We have heard from many of you in this scenario and have it resolved, but wanted to mention this for any other staff who might need to create a separate parent portal account.

Last year, Apple introduced a security setting on iPads that appears to be causing some issues for certain sites that we use. Most significantly, it may cause slow load times for content in the Amplify Science curriculum. Other sites, such as PebbleGo and other media resources might also be affected. Nobody on the vendor side has actually been able to confirm the potential fix, we are just sharing what appears to be a resolution for an on-going issue.

Over the next two months we will be shifting our Internet content filtering over from Lightspeed Relay to Linewize.

Why Change?

We regularly re-evaluate our systems to determine if tools we are using are still a good fit for our environment. While Relay provided necessary Internet content filtering (which we are legally required to have) we also found it to be difficult to manage overall and occasionally problematic for specific staff and students when it would choose not to work. After a thorough evaluation of multiple alternatives, as well as field testing across grades and devices, we determined that Linewize offered enough improvements to justify a change.

User Impact

iPad users: System changes will be automated and you should notice very little functional difference on iPads.

MacBook users: Changes will mostly be automated, we have some details in the process still being worked out meaning they will be the last group of machines to switch over.

PC/Windows users: We will work directly with PC users to migrate them over from Relay to Linewize. PC Labs will be updated this summer.

Timelines/Notifications

Tech will send out email notices for each portion of the project over the next two months.

Practice/Policy impact

We will continue to have options for a baseline/default filtering level, a more restrictive "No Social Media" group, and the most restrictive "Aggressive" filtering levels. Current documentation on "Relay Filtering Levels" will be updated, but is still relevant as a general guideline of what each of those filtering levels mean.

Parent Experience

Parents of students in the district currently can receive weekly reports on student device usage. This will continue via a companion product called Qustodio. More details on that will be published to TechTools and communicated out. Briefly, parent reports will still be available, as well as an app that parents can use for device management and additional cyber safety resources.

Friendly reminder: Phishing is a message where you perceive a threat or deception. Junk mail is annoying, but it is not phishing. Reporting internal communication in particular as junk mail could result in legitimate internal messaging being categorized as junk and therefore missed not just by you but by others (since the system looks at everyone's behavior toward certain types of messages to detect patterns and acts upon messages accordingly).

We are finishing up testing of multi-factor authentication settings within the tech department and will be rolling it out to all staff late March and the end of the school year.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is the process of using items from different sources to validate one's identity or account. Common sources include:

• Something you know: like a password or Personal Identification Number (PIN);

• Something you have: like a smart card, mobile token, or hardware token; and,

• Some form of biometric factor (e.g., fingerprint, palm print, or voice recognition).

Documentation to walk through some setup steps is being drafted and will be refined as we work through adding groups of staff to the multi-factor authentication process.

Lastly, just to say it as clearly as possible: MFA is about account security and protecting the information attached to that account, whether that is limited to an individual or extends into systems with various sensitive data. That means that all staff will be set up to use MFA, and there will not be any exceptions under any circumstances.

We have moved to a common format and implementation of how Sub Plans are housed within Google drive.

Here's where we are:

• All schools use a SHARE drive called School - Sub Plans (School being the name or initials of the school).
• All teaching staff at the school should create a folder with, minimally, their last name. If there are any repeated last names in a building, you should add an initial or other indicator so that a sub can easily find the folder.

The drives are built. Any building with an existing non-Share drive version that needs assistance with migrating should designate someone to submit a help ticket so we can facilitate moving content over as needed.

We will be sending out a series of brief Launchpad bulletins over the next few months to provide an overview of what it does, what you can find there, and what's next.

Just a reminder, planning ahead and using central duplicating for large-volume printing is the least costly option:

The majority of our summer work will be device prep and catching up on a backlog of audio-visual installations.

Most particularly affected for audio-visual will be East and West. Possibly Sweeney depending on supply chain status.

We'll be posting for some summer tech help in late April to assist with the physical labor of device prep (unpacking, inventory tagging, casing, and so on) as well some other maintenance tasks.

The fastest and best way to get help is by opening a ticket using one of these contact methods. Less effective and in some cases inconsiderate: Sticky notes, direct emails, or giving out the direct phone extension of whatever tech person you happen to have known forever.

E-mail: helpdesk@shakopee.k12.mn.us

Web: https://whd.shakopee.k12.mn.us/

Phone: 952-496-5100

If you need a call-back please add a good number and time to contact you in ticket.

Whenever possible and necessary we may also use remote support tools such as Splashtop to assist you.

Details help! For instance, student name and ID number is useful when submitting a ticket in regards to a student issue. Or letting us know if you already tried common troubleshooting steps such as restarting. "Student 123456 had this specific problem on their iPad starting at 9 AM this morning." is a much more useful starting point than "I have student with a problem." We appreciate the detail and it helps speed up the process of resolving an issue.

Email: helpdesk@shakopee.k12.mn.us
Website: https://techtools.shakopeeschools.org/
Location: 1200 Shakopee Town Square, Shakopee, MN, USA
Phone: 5100