Tech Notes - May

This week we are completing our migration to the Frontline Insights Platform. The first step involves cleaning up accounts and merging any duplicates. The Insights Platform provides enhanced functionality to create a better experience for you - including a single Frontline ID account, common navigation, improved security and use of the Frontline Education mobile app.

HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU

We will transition onto the Insights Platform on Friday, May 25, a little after 9:30 am. You will receive an email invitation from no-reply@frontlineed.com. Use this email to create your new Frontline ID account. Moving forward, you will use this single account to access all your Frontline applications. Please click Create a Frontline ID from the email and follow the instructions. For more information on creating your Frontline ID, please review this article: Receiving an Email Invitation for a Frontline Application.

Once you’ve created your Frontline ID account, you can now login to app.frontlineeducation.com when signing into any Frontline application you have access to. You can also switch between applications using the app switcher, shown below. If you have multiple roles, you can role switch (applicable only to Absence Management.)

Please note you will continue to use your existing Phone Login ID and Pin when using the phone/kiosk system. In other words, iPad or similar time-clocks will function as they always have for the purposes of clocking in and out.

We will be collecting 4th generation iPads throughout the summer. Our hope is to get as many back as possible by the last day of school so that we can do a surplus device sale and get the best price for them. (Staff that feel a strong need to hold onto the device over summer can do so since we will not receive new devices until sometime in June or July.)

4th generation iPads are the larger size, and are no longer able to update to the latest version of the iOS operating system. The largest batch is all of the kindergarten iPads, but there are also around 300 currently being used by staff.

Most of these will be swapped out for a newer iPad. A full list of these devices and last known whereabouts can be found here.

This summer we will replace the iPads in the Kindergarten carts.

There will still be a 2:1 ratio of devices to students.

Note that these will be new, meaning they will not have any apps installed on them for the start of the year.

We do not have a wide variety of case colors to choose from for this model, so we expect all cases to be the same color.

We expect new iPads to be ready on or around August 20th.

If you have an iPad cart in your classroom and feel like some of the cables in that cart are going bad, please put in a help ticket for inspection and replacement of those charging cables. It would be especially helpful if you could tag or otherwise indicate which cables are problematic. Thanks!

Seesaw End of the Year Reminders:

• Ignore any end-of-year emails from Seesaw

• You do not need to archive your courses (tech will take care of this)

• Please do not delete any students from your classrooms

• Do not turn off parent access
  

Pearson

Presentation

• Part 1 - Pre-Collection Information (5/18/18)
  
• Part 2 - Collection Day (5/25/18)
  

East & West Junior Highs

Presentation

• Part 1 - Pre-Collection Information (5/18/18)
  
• Part 2 - Collection Day (5/29/18, 10:55-12:55)
  

High School Collection Dates & Times

12th Grade

• Thursday, May 24th – 10:00-4:00
  
• Friday, May 25th – 10:00-4:00
  

10th-11th Grade

• Tuesday, May 29 - 11:00-3:00
  
• Wednesday, May 30 - 10:00-1:00
  

Tokata Learning Center

• Wednesday, May 30 - 8:00-3:00
  

DLC Staff sent out e-mails with the following info and also included presentations to use with your classes to walk through the process.

The 3rd and 4th grade iPads will not be erased and will be rolled up to the next grade in order for the students to use them on the first day of school this fall! The 5th grade iPads will be erased and cycled down to 3rd grade and set up in the fall. We do need your help in getting these iPads ready for summer. We have prepared a short presentation you can go through with your students.

The last day iPads will be available to classrooms and students is Friday, May 25th.

Before May 25th, go through this presentation with your students. Each student needs to:

• Clean their iPad (You will be provided with cleaning wipes)

• Delete all photos (3rd-4th only)

• Take a Selfie and Set-Lock Screen (3rd-4th only)

• Label iPad with Post-It note (3rd-4th only)

Pearson: 5/24/18

High School - 12th graders: 5/25/18

Junior High: 5/29/18

High School & Tokata: 10th & 11th graders not holding on to MacBook over summer: 5/30/2018

If you are getting an "Active Directory login" error message when trying to log into Infinite Campus, one troubleshooting step is to try to clear the browser cache. Google Chrome directions are as follows:

1. From the “Menu” button in the upper-right corner of the Chrome window, choose “More Tools” > “Clear browsing data…“.
2. Press “CTRL” + “Shift” + “Delete” keys in Windows or Linux, or “Command” + “Shift” + “Delete” keys on MacOS.

This is the next piece of FrontLine we will be working on. The goal is for it to be ready by mid-August. Anything you would normally do in either KeepCertified or Apex Total Program will be moving to Frontline.

Note that KeepCertified will remain active through June 2019. We will be providing additional info around the start of the school year about how to migrate data from KeepCertified to Frontline.

We will be finishing a project to change the naming convention for our e-mail groups to make them a little shorter and simpler. The use of "Distro" in front of an e-mail distribution group name will be dropped and the majority of the groups will start with building initials, followed by an underscore and the group name.

The format would be: <Building Initials>_Group Name

Current list of Building Initials

CFC - Central Family Center

DO - District Office

EC - Eagle Creek

JC - Jackson

RO - Red Oak

SP - Sun Path

SW - Sweeney

PR - Pearson

EJH - East Junior High (will change to either E or EMS this summer)

WJH - West Junior High (will change to either W or WMS this summer)

HS - High School

TLC - Tokata Learning Center

We also use these initials:

DW - District Wide

We will be sharing a detailed version of our updated password policy soon, but here are the key points for the moment:

• We are discontinuing the practice of forcing password changes annually.
  

Any passwords created from now on will have the following minimum requirements:

• Must be between 8 to 16 characters long.
• Cannot contain any part of your username or name.
• Cannot be any of your last three passwords.

This summer we will do one more wave of Chromebook cart refreshes, which will actually be a combination of relocating newer carts from Pearson and replacing the oldest models in our fleet. Older Chromebooks are being phased out/recycled.

Recently, our printer services provider, Businessware, was bought out by a company called Marco. You may have noticed new service stickers on all printers and some side effects to this change, such as toner restocking taking longer. For various reasons, we decided to look into other options for a print management vendor.

In July, we will be switching services to Loffler. This will create another transition period, but we hope to end up with more efficient services and we will see a cost-per-page reduction of about 20% less than our current rates.

The DLCs and tech staff are working on a new version of the tech tools site, to be launched sometime this summer or at the start of the next school year.

This spring we sent out a survey on the topic of audio-visual equipment use in the classroom. This helped to clarify how hardware such as interactive white boards and software such as Smart Notebook were being used in the district. It also reinforced the need to get active participation in the process of looking at our audio-visual environment and developing a plan for what it looks like a year, five years, even ten years from now.

At the start of the 2018-2019, we will invite staff to join an audio-visual exploratory committee. This group will be focused on PK-8 spaces.

Challenges that committee must confront include:

• SmartBoard as a company has done little to innovate in the past few years and has actually made their software less functional (on Macs) in recent releases.
• When the district chose to go with a Mac platform, it appears that not enough consideration was given to the limitations of Macs when it comes to interactive whiteboards.
• The technical environment in this district from initial investment in SmartBoards up to now has changed dramatically. Teacher mobility on Mac laptops, student access to tech at 1:1 levels in 3rd grade and up, tablet devices (iPads) K-8 – none of these were present or remotely foreseen at the time. Continuing to invest in A-V technology that pays no heed to our actual day to day environment is a practice borne of inertia, not innovation.
• Funding to do a mass upgrade is limited in any given calendar year and we are a couple years out from being able to make significant, district-wide changes to our A-V environment. Which is why now is the time to start planning for what’s next.

Staff involvement will be critical to the success of such a committee and to the process of reviewing options moving forward and making innovative and informed decisions on what comes next. So, if you are interested, please be on the look-out for news about this committee in late August-early September.

• Launch of Frontline Professional Learning Management
  
• Launch of Frontline Central
  
• Refining our use of LaserFiche and exploring the use of LaserFiche Forms
  
• General availability of Infinite Campus Fee payment through the parent portal
  
• A-V Committee
  
• Development of bid documents for phone system replacement
  
• Bidding and vendor selection for phone system replacement (summer 2019 completion)
  
• Continue to strategically upgrade and reduce printer fleet
  

Photo credit: Chris Fleming.

Email: helpdesk@shakopee.k12.mn.us
Website: https://whd.shakopee.k12.mn.us
Location: 1200 Shakopee Town Square, Shakopee, MN, USA
Phone: 5100
Twitter: @ShakoTechDrozd