As a former technology director, I was always looking for ways to find the ROI on the many initiatives and projects that we instituted around the district. Adding further complexity, Education IT tends to have different goals than a “traditional” IT department would. In education, we look for transformational changes in learning. Specifically, many schools […]
It’s summer and we’d all rather be listening to the waves rolling in rather than spending time setting up and preparing existing Chromebooks for the next school year. While we’ve visited this topic before, we thought we would remind you of a few options available and provide a few tips and tricks to speed up […]
Here’s the scenario. It’s a new year and your staff has shuffled positions. You have added them to the proper distribution lists, calendars, and updated the school website. All systems are a go…until the phone rings. The staff member is happily in their new position but realizes that they need files that the previous staff […]
School is fast approaching and soon (if not already) students will be firing up Chromebooks in classrooms across your district. You can become the hero that your district didn’t even know they needed! Navigating websites, creating Google Drive files, accessing Google Workspace services will be a common task for students. So how can Google Workspace […]
Now that Google NEXT19 is officially in the rearview mirror and our twitter feeds are no longer inundated with constant photos, videos, and updates from the event, it is time that we consider the impact that those changes may have on our Google environments. Ultimately, like any live event, a lot of the excitement was […]
Keeping email correspondence ‘hush-hush’ between parties never sounded so easy with the release of Google’s Confidential Mode in Gmail for Google Workspace customers and Google for Education users. To ensure we are all on the same page – Confidential Mode is a setting within Gmail that allows emails to be sent and then automatically deleted from […]
Communication is key in any industry and especially as it relates to business processes happening in schools. From it’s days of “Google Talk” to “G Chat”, Google Hangouts has always been viewed as a simple chat interface. With the introduction Hangouts Chat we are seeing functionality that is far beyond just sending emoji’s to a […]
As an admin, you’re often getting requests to provide various types of permissions/access to a small set of users in an OU that may currently have the service otherwise disabled. For example, you may get a special request to allow a single middle school class to have access to YouTube for a project, even though […]
Today is the day and the perfect opportunity to show all your teachers how much easier it is to ‘Jam’ with Google’s latest feature update for Jamboard. This update allows for the creation and editing of jams from the web and it also offers a new “View Only” mode. For those who might not have […]
Too many cooks in the kitchen! As we dive deeper into Google’s Shared Drive functionality, many of us have realized the weeds we are getting ourselves, our educators, and our students into. Originally, the purpose of Shared Drives was to provide a platform for open access use with a similar permission model as other content […]
Google released an update in August where all buildings and rooms management features are now consolidated into one location aptly named “Buildings and resources” within the Admin console. What exactly does this mean for K12 Admins? I’m glad you asked…… In short, schools can use this feature to not only manage rooms but also Chromebook carts, lab […]
IT departments & Chromebooks: love at first site Knowing what chrome device you are going to implement is half the battle. The day has come that they have arrived, all 10,000 of them, and now it’s time to get down to work. Enrolling your devices can be a daunting task especially if you have a […]