Using Finalsite and Google Forms to address complex form creation.

Posted on 09/27/2018 by William Stites

 

Complex_FormsWe are often asked to create a variety of different forms for our institutions: donations, events, interests, just to name a few. Many of these can be built quite easily, but when you have a particularly complex form to build sometime you need to think differently about it and employ a combination of solutions.

Recently the state of New Jersey pass a new hiring law dubbed the “Pass the Trash” that would “…giving New Jersey school administrators sweeping new powers to warn other districts about teachers accused of sexual abuse…“.

This change in law requires school to gather a twenty (20) year employment history on all applicants and specific information if the applicant has had direct contact with students or children.

This new law and it’s requirements presented us with a challenge of designing an application form that could gather and track all of this information.

The sheer volume of information that needs to be collected to meet the requirements is a tad overwhelming. Finding a solution that allows you to collect the required, relevant information in a way that is manageable and provides a good user interface and experience (UI/UX) is difficult.

To solve this problem I turned to two tools, Forms Manager from Finalsite – our school’s web site provider- and Google Forms.

Forms Manager gives me a way of building forms that are configurable and provide a good UI/UX experience. You can build a page that matches your schools look and feel . Elements that can be arranged in numerous ways to make for a smooth flow for data entry and by using conditional fields applicants only need to see those fields that a relevant to their needs and history.

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Three helpful hints for deploying 2 Factor Authentication

Posted on 09/26/2018 by William Stites

3As part of the work that we are doing to address the growing number of cybersecurity concerns at my school we are requiring 2 factor authentication for all employees using our Google accounts.

The GSuite of tools are being using throughout the school and a number of third-party services are leveraging these credentials for their own authentication methods.

This move, along with others which I will detail in future posts, are just some steps we are taking to better secure our user, our data and our school.

When rolling this out in person training, detail instructions and support is needed. With all of this there always some things that unexpectedly pop-up and here are three that did for us and suggestions for solving them:
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Device concerns for our Apple 1:1 and the future

Posted on 09/24/2018 by William Stites

concerns_head_in_handsThis coming June we will be refreshing our device fleet and celebrating what will be the 10th year our 1:1 learning initiative.

The program has held at its core the learning goals and has let those goals lead the technology choices and use in the classroom. There is, however, a major shift in the way Apple is deploying equipment which will have a major impact on our program and the ways in which we manage and deploy our fleet.

Our goal has alway been to allow our user to have their device with them 24/7/365 for the three-year cycle we have with equipment. We have been able to achieve this given the fact the we are a self-servicing account for Apple AND the fact that hard drive in the laptops have always been removable… until now. This and a host of other changes have use concerned moving forward.

THE CONCERNS

1. Non-removable SSDs – As Apple continues to soldered the drives to the logic board, our model of supporting users stops. We currently are able to turn a repair around to a student or faculty member in minutes by simply removing the SSD from the damaged device and putting it into a loaner. The client is able to walk out the door and back to class while their device is either repair internally or shipped out to Apple.

With a non-removable hard drive  we now need to figure out ways to a users data off of their machine and onto a loaner as well as making sure the drive is backed up prior to shipping it out to Apple if that is what is required for the repair.

As we continue to use more cloud-based service this becomes less and less of an issue, however it is still something that will require more time and thought.

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Thoughts and musing as I start my 25th year.

Posted on 09/23/2018 by William Stites

25_YearsHow many of you knew that I started at my current, first and only job as a student teacher in 1993?

I was a student at Montclair State University and planning on becoming a third grade teacher. I had previously been studying fine arts and going for my BFA, but all things change and so did my major.  During this time I did however purchase my first computer Apple computer, a Macintosh LCII, and was dabbling in some graphic design and web design.

In the fall of 1993 I started one of my two student teaching assignments at Montclair Kimberley Academy’s lower school (Brookside) in a third grade classroom. During this time the school was investing heavily in putting in a new network which was to include a large number of Apple computers on a Novell network.

The network manager knew Novell, but not Macs and my time with my LCII and being a poor college student who needed to figure out how to use and network computers to get what I needed done so a career began. I was able to help get the MKA network off the ground and for the following year was offered a job as the primary school technology teacher.

A so a career began…

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5 tips for avoiding the blank stare when talking about data management.

Posted on 01/19/2018 by William Stites

We’ve all seen it, that moment when you start talking to people about a topic and you know they have no idea what you are talking about or don’t understand half of the words coming out of your mouth.

You get that blank stare…

blank_stare

While sometimes it can be confused as being deep in thought you need to be sure. You need to know you have people engaged and involved in the conversation.

When talking about data, in particular data management within your institution this can often be tricky. While people count on using data every day and rely on the accuracy of it, they often don’t see it as their problem to solve or something to concern themselves with.

This is often where the problem starts, talking about data practices and understanding how to deal with the issue around data management. You need a plan to get people engaged, invested and involved in the conversations without getting that blank stare.

Here are five suggestions for starting your conversations around data management:

Get the key players to the table

What do I mean my key players? These are the decision makers, the departments leaders, the administrator in each of the respective areas/domains: admissions, academics, development, alumni, commutations, business office, auxiliary programs, etc. You want the leaders in these areas, not those doing the work, but those using the work to guide the institution and are making the decisions that have the greatest impact.

While input from those doing the daily work will be important, that input can be used once the wants, needs and problems can be articulate and goals from these management conversation can be made.

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Gone in a FLASH – Dealing with FLASH and your browser.

Posted on 10/13/2017 by William Stites

eolFLASHAdobe’s FLASH is slowly going away and by the end of 2020 will officially be “end of life”.

You can’t run FLASH content on any iOS device and with each new browser update FLASH content is getting harder and harder to run… and with good reason. This year alone 6 out of 10 of the vulnerabilities incorporated by exploit kits affected Adobe Flash Player.

But what if you “need” FLASH? You have content that you need to view, display, share or use?

First, make sure that you have the most up-to-date version of your browser and the most current version of FLASH installed (https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/). Then you will need to know where to go on your browser to activate (or deactivate) FLASH. You can explicitly allow of block FLASH from running for specific site and you should ONLY run flash from a trusted site.

To activate FLASH on a particular browser:

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Our experiences with the AppleTV in Education.

Posted on 09/26/2017 by William Stites

AppleTVSo ee have AppleTV 3 (2nd gen) deployed EVERYWHERE! This is actually our second refresh of the devices since putting them in about 2 or 3 years ago. We initially put them in as we wanted to allow teachers and students better access to presenting through AirPlay. This would allow any device in the classroom be the device people were looking at without the need for a cable or numerous adapters… it would simplify things.e

Our initial go at this proved difficult with our first deployment of AppleTVs as we had both technical issues and user training issues. The idea of projecting any video-based resource proved problematic and there were at time issue with the AppleTV showing up properly in the AirPlay menu. You needed to understand when to project wireless and when to still rely on the hard wire.

When we upgrade to the AppleTV 3s it was in hope that we would see better performance with the upgrades to AirPlay and what we being touted as a more robust version. While we did see some performance improvements it still remained somewhat of a problem, though not nearly as much as before.

We decided to run a hardwired, ethernet connection to all of the devices.

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Uncovering iOS 9.3 for Education

Posted on 01/31/2016 by William Stites

iOS-9.3-logo-full-sizeWith the release of iOS 9.3 Apple will have finally taken steps bring true management to the iPad.

While information can be found on the Apple web site there are still many questions and answers needed. While attending the NEIT (NYSAIS Education & Information Technology) conference I had the opportunity to sit in on a session and get deeper insights and this is what I found.

iOS 9.3 will provide a shared model for iPads, not a multi-user experience. Students will be able to login to an account, though the manner in which they authenticate has yet to be determined. Your MDM, Apple ID or Active Directory may provide an answer. Students will have fast accost their materials which will be synced to each device via a mechanism possibly tied to Apple’s Caching Server. All of the apps the student will be using must be installed on the device and the amount of space needed per student account (possibly up to 6GB, though this is still a major question) will allow for fast access, but significantly limit the number of students that will be able to share the device along with the actual size of the device used as information will be stored on the local device.

If you are familiar with Casper Focus, Apple will be providing a similar tool in the Classroom app with iOS 9.3. The tool will allow teachers to distribute data, allow for the editing of that data and bring it back to the teacher. Again, the details of which as still unclear, but the it will again integrate with your existing MDM and LMS. This will offload a lot of the management and give teacher more flexibility with their iPads. They will be able to see all of the iPads at once, capture and share that device with all of the other devices.

All of this will be accomplished through the next two pieces: Apple School Manager and Managed Apple IDs.

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Disabling “Find My Mac” on retired equipment.

Posted on 01/31/2016 by William Stites

Find_My_MacWhen hiring you always want to surround yourself with people smarter than you are and I have the pleasure of working with some incredibly talented people. We come up against problems everyday and even try to think of the things that might present problems in the future.

The subject of this post is one where we were thinking about all of the things we would need to do as we go in this summer where we will be retiring over 1000 devices. We have a checklist of things that we need to ask our user (faculty and students as young as 4th grade) to do before returning their equipment as well as a laundry list of things we have to do as well.

One of the issues surrounds that of how to handle the services associate with an AppleID. There are things you need to do with you iTunes account (deauthorizing the device) and you iCloud account amongst other things. It is the “Find My Mac” feature that presents an interesting problem.

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Passwords, phishing and protecting yourself. Tips and lessons.

Posted on 09/03/2014 by William Stites

 

[Examples Gallery Update: 9/4/2014]

With the recent compromise of a number of celebrities iCloud Photo Streams there is, yet again, more focus on passwords, security and how to protect yourself.

In the case of this most recent attack the perpetrators simply attempted to use a number of common passwords along with figuring out the security questions to compromise the accounts in question.  Apple has denied that iCloud was hacked by exploiting a hole in the “Find My iPhone” feature and that any exposed issue has been patched.

OK… but now what?

We need to better educate ourselves, our faculty, our students on how to protect themselves and their information as we ask them to do more and more online.

A few tips:

  • To start, make sure you have a secure password. It should have a combination of upper and lowercase letters, include numbers and symbols and be greater than 8 characters long. Birth dates, anniversaries, family or pet names should be avoided as they can be easily guessed.
  • This may sound simple, but don’t share you password with anyone. In school this is something that we tell our students and faculty upfront. At our school we have ways to solve you technical problems without you having to give us your password and if you school or organization doesn’t have a way to do that be sure to change your password frequently.
  • Try using a password with a twist. If you don’t want to have a different password for every site and service you use try adding a prefix of suffix to your password for that particular service. You might use “MyS3cret_facebook” for Facebook and “MyS3cret_gmail” for your Google account.
  • Enable two-step or two-factor verification for your accounts. While this will only really protect you against people changing you account information or password it is an added level of security to take when trying to secure your information online.

Phishing

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to “phish” and you feed him all your passwords…”

Phishing, as defined by Wikipedia is “… is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity.”

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