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Apple Classroom Setup and Overview

JAMF Teacher App Overview

1:1 Macbook Setup

How to Create Device Groups in JAMF School

How to Create a Class in JAMF School

Profiles in JAMF School

How to Purchase and Assign Apps for JAMF School

How to Create an Apple School Manager Account

JAMF School's Overview

Submitting and Approving Work - SeeSaw

How to Add Class Work - SeeSaw

How to Create Folders - SeeSaw

How to Link Parents to Students - SeeSaw

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How to Create a New Class - SeeSaw

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Some of you may or may not have read about the new Microsoft Licensing as yet. For those of you who don’t know about it as yet, every year your school pays an annual subscription for Microsoft Licensing usually to a company called SoftwareOne formally trading as Computelec.

This annual license will now cost your school more than what it did in previous years.
Previously the license would be based on FTE count, which stands for “Full Time Equivalent” number. You would count your full time employment and then multiply it by a magic number (rate) that SoftwareOne would give you, then count the number of servers you have and multiply that by a pre determined rate and this will give you the number you have to pay them for your annual licensing.

The change has come about due to the original Microsoft agreement deal being re negotiated after it had run its four year course from 2011 to 2014 with a 1 year extension.

So what’s the change?

Microsoft are now offering a new deal through a different license method which is based upon CAL’s or by its proper name “Client Access License”. So what is a client access license?
A CAL is a soft license that allows a user to access a server and its resources on it. For each student or staff member who accesses the server you will need one CAL license for that person to be in compliance if you were to ever get audited. This method covers you for school owned devices, that are not assigned for exclusive use for example, a 1:1 scheme (parent or school funded).

Recently the Catholic Education Office released a news article giving you an indication of what each CAL license will cost you. The table is below will help you quickly work out how much it will cost your school each year. Please note that there are two different pricing scales you need to use depending on how you use the Microsoft products in your school. As an easy indication, if your school uses microsoft products on the all the student machines, laptops or 1:1 devices, you will be classed as a “Heavy User”. If you only use Microsoft products on your admin computers and a few staff computers around the school then you would be classed as a “Light User”

Heavy User

Sub Total Owing for licensing will be $11,700

Light User

Sub Total Owing for licensing will be $8,700

Some of you at this point may be thinking “thats almost four times more than what we paid last year” and are about to send an email to your IT contact to work out your options of getting out of this annual subscription.

I have done the thinking for you, and as it stands this is still your best option depending on the size of your school. Here is why:

Option 1

Lets say you purchase out right licenses for you staff and servers. The following pricing table outlines the cost for each item, to work out what it would cost your school all you need to do is fill in the blanks.

Pros:

• It is a once off figure for your licenses. The licenses will be perpetual and you will not need to renew them every year.

Cons:

• It is a large up front figure where the License agreement is a yearly subscription
• If you buy a particular version of Office Windows or Windows server, you will be stuck with it until you buy the latest version which means you will need to buy a license again!
• This could potentially increase your chances of being  audited for licenses by Microsoft.

Option 2

Note: This will only work if you have a IT program where your students access technology via a chrome book, iPad, Macbook. It will NOT work if you have a lab of Windows computers or Windows laptops.

Another option is to split your network into staff and students. All staff will fall under your Microsoft Licenses and your students will be controlled under a new Server running a Linux operating system. The new linux operating system is free under an open source license. The linux server will allow the student devices to “talk” over the network to printers, the internet etc. It will also plug into zScaler (if your using it) and Google Apps Directory Sync. You can remote into the new linux server and create new student users etc as you usually did.

Pros:

• Your MS licensing will greatly decrease as you wont need to include the students in your license count

Cons:

• You will need to make sure that your IT tech knows what he is doing with Linux installations as it is very different to Windows Server. To find a technician who can administer linux can be hard and costly!
• To reconfigure your current network to this new setup can cost your school a lot of money as you are essentially re creating a network for your student as well as all their accounts.
• This solution will force your students to only use google apps or office 365 as their “word, excel and powerpoint” solution. The students can not use Microsoft Office or you will be in breach of your licensing.

Option 3

Option 3 combined both option 2 and 3 together where you pay an out right license for your staff and split your network into two for students and staff. However this could potentially increase your chances of being  audited for licenses (a headache you don’t want to go through!)

Summing up as to which option is best for your school will rest on your current student and staff numbers. You need to work out what your MS licensing will cost for the year and then do a comparison with options 1 and 2. If you need help with the decision process feel free to contact us or the CEO Consulting team.

The post New Microsoft Licensing – Be Prepared appeared first on ITdynamics.

If you want your staff to really utilise a new technology you need to make it a necessity for them to use it. Finding ways to implement it into their daily routine is the key. I have said it in previous posts, people are creatures of habit. They find a routine and while they may steer away from it every now and then they will still snap back into the routine like an elastic band that is being stretched.

I have seen many schools do great things with google apps, ranging from setting up a information board or “day book” in the staff room through a LCD panel or projector to a school moving their Tshare into Google Drive so that staff can access their documents from home with ease.

I am now going to go through some ideas that schools have implemented in a little more detail. My advice is to adopt one of these ideas into your school and implement it into the teachers daily routine. I can assure you that staff WILL find it difficult for the first time, but like tying a shoe lace, it will become second nature to them. Soon they will be doing it without even realising what they are doing. As a result you will have helped them increase their productivity through technology.

Staff Portal Page

The first and possibly best step would be to implement a staff portal page if you have not already done so. I can’t stress enough the importance of having this page as it will tie in all the following items I talk about in this article. A staff member needs a site were they can quickly and easily click on an item and be taken directly there. If they need to browse through different menu structures and try to guess were things are, it becomes to hard for them and they will stop trying, and once they stop trying its very hard to get their interest back into it. My rule is, anything you need should be no more than two clicks away. If your breaking this rule and your wondering why no one is using the staff portal page then this could be the reason. Another VERY important point to make it to set this page the default page when opening up ANY browser. Now days I find staff using a whole different range of browsers, I even met one teacher who was using four different browsers because she thought that’s how its suppose to work. At a click of a button the staff should be able to see their portal page clear as day with the items they need.

Digital Day Books

I’m sure everyone has heard of “The Day Book”. Every school has one, however they may call it something different. The Day Book contains the daily activities and functions inside the school. Some schools have this day book as a written book in the staff room which all staff members view, other schools have a Word document stored on the Tshare which everyone modifies and then views and some schools have a procedure where all staff are to email the admin with items they want everyone to know about, it’s then the admins job to compile them into a document and email it out. If currently your staff already have the ability to add notes to a digital notices board then this section probably isn’t for you. If not, then I suggest you look into setting up a digital notice board using google sites!
This will allow your teachers to post their daily items onto a notice board without having it second handled by an admin member or teacher – at a click of a button its up! To really get this idea off the ground it is wise to display this digital board in your staff room using a projector or LCD screen. As staff members post items into your new daily work book it will display in the staff room as well as anyone else viewing the daily work book from their device. My second bit of advice is to put a link to this daily work book on the staff portal page. Staff need to be able to access this site within two clicks of a mouse, if its any harder than that, they wont adapt to it easily!

Google Drive

If your game enough to venture out into cloud storage than get your staff onto Google Drive. The best and easiest way to utilise Google Drive is to use it via the Google Drive application which installs on your computer. Using the web interface “drive.google.com” should really only be used when administering permissions, moving large files around or accessing your documents when you are on a computer which normally isn’t yours. Have all your staff install the application and then get them to bring their devices to a staff meeting to get them to login for the first time. The reason why you want to have all the staff together is for two reasons.

1. I can guarantee that some staff will try to login with the wrong email address, a friendly neighbour in the staff meeting can help them on the right path and in turn reduce the probability of you having a headache at the end of the exercise.
2. Demonstrate with the staff the power of sharing folder and files with another staff member and get them familiar with where the documents are saving when they are synchronised from Google Drive.

Once this is done, Share a new folder you have created under the admin account called “Teachers” with all the staff. This will be the new sharing point for all the staff and you will see how quickly it will grow when staff start to use it.

If you already have all three of these down packed in your school then give yourself a pat on the back!

The post We have setup Google Apps… Now what? appeared first on ITdynamics.

With the new CathEdNet Router installation now almost complete in the schools many of you may be asking what the point of the exercise is besides replacing some old hardware. Terminology such as “Hot / Cold”, QOS, double the bandwidth are some of the terms being thrown around and i’m sure some of you are a little puzzled as to what it all means?

Why is this happening may be your first question? In order for you school to be connected to the internet, send and receive CatheEdNet emails and browse websites such as MyHR, the CathEdNet intranet or CAS portal your school needs to be connected to the CathEdNet network. This is all done through the schools router or as some of you may know it as, the CEO Router. It’s job is to simply navigate the traffic from your computer to the right location. From the moment you click on the “Send” button on your emails, this router will navigate the traffic to the place it needs to go to. Now after many years and possibly millions of emails and website requests each school has sent it, like anything it needed to go into retirement and be replaced with a newer, faster and stronger version of itself!

So what does this new “CEO Router” do thats different to the old one? Possibly the biggest ticket item is that it is twice the speed / bandwidth. I tend to use the terminology “lanes of traffic” a lot when explaining this to principals or staff.

Think of your internet connection as a highway with two lanes of traffic. In the two lanes of traffic are many cars speeding down the highway moving toward their destination. At different times of the day there are more cars on the road resulting in congestion on the highway slowing everyone down from 100 km to 30 km. Now taking that picture, I want you to imagine that those cars are actually your internet requests. For example your colleague accessing MyHR is one car, your principal sending an email is another car and the 31 kids in Year Five all accessing YouTube adds another 31 cars to the highway. You can see from this analogy that the more people sending their “cars” down the highway on only two lanes of traffic can cause your internet to slow down.

Now with the new CEO Router imagine that your lanes of traffic have now increase from two to four. This means you can send twice the amount of cars down the highway without slowing the speed down.

QoS or Quality of Service is (in the least technical terminology possible) a way that the traffic on your highway can have priority to get to where it needs to go, faster. The best way to describe this is to think back to your highway which now has four lanes of traffic. Imagine all your cars are travelling happily down your highway when all of a sudden you hear an emergency vehicle with the siren sounding coming up fast in your rear vision mirror. Your cars move aside and let the emergency vehicle pass because it has a higher priority. This put simple is QoS, the traffic passing through the new CEO router has the ability to priorities traffic over other traffic.

Hot and Cold? No we are not talking about a shower with a faulty hot water system here.

Hot / Cold is just the terminology used when describing a special lane of traffic that your highway now has on the new Router. Once again we go back to the picture of your four lanes of traffic on the highway with all your busy cars and emergency vehicles driving down the highway. At some point your highway will be congested with traffic and while your emergency vehicles are trying to shoot past the normal traffic it can still be slow to pass due to the large number of cars on the highway. Now I want you to imagine a special lane on your highway dedicated to emergency vehicles, much like a taxi or bus lane on a highway. The 4 lanes of traffic is your “Cold” connection while your special taxi/bus lane is the “Hot” connection. Everybody in peak hour traffic always looks at the bus / taxi lane in envy as its flowing quickly while your at a stand still. This put simply is your Hot / Cold connection on your new CEO Router. So what goes down this “Hot” connection? Sites like MyHR, CAS portal, Cathednet intranet, CathEdNet emails, Seqta and a few more services all use this new “Hot” lane of traffic. As a result, if you have year 4, 5 and 6 all on YouTube you can rest assure that your access the MyHR or Seqta will not be slow or affected because all the traffic the students are using are going out through the “Cold” connection while your traffic is going out the “Hot”

Now for the technical stuff! For those of  you helping out in the schools with the IT, This section is for you.

Previously any changes that needed to be made to your CEO router’s ACL lists, all needed to be passed onto Telstra by a CathEdNet technician for Telstra to process. This could sometimes take up to 24 hours. Now the new router’s are configured for inbound ACL filtering – so all traffic to and from the school is controlled by the Checkpoint firewall. What does this mean? You can now contact the CathEdNet service desk for immediate action and not wait for a techy sitting behind a desk in a Telstra building to do it for you.

Hopefully that has cleared up a few questions you may have been asking yourself when you receive an email about the new Routers. If you have any more questions please feel free to comment or flick me an email.

The post Faster, Stronger and Twice The Speed! appeared first on ITdynamics.