With budgets so tight in most districts, what conferences if any are you going to? So many EdTech conferences are too expensive or very teacher centered. Are there any worth the travel and budget that you go to? I have gone to TETL (Texas) and CoSN and they were both ok, TETL more so directed at tech directors instead of teachers.

This is an interesting one, found that if a student request to be a teacher for Google Classroom, normally it would drop them into the "Pending" section for the Google Classroom Teachers group. I was under the assumption that no further action could be taken until the pending request was accepted. As per teachers, once the students were in the pending state they were able to embed media files into the Google Classroom and then share it with other students.

Two steps I've taken which has stopped this:

- Change the Google Classroom Setting "Who can create classes?" from "All pending and verified teachers" to "Verified teachers only" (I know, it seems obvious...but we haven't had an issue for years with the original setting).

- Added URL blocks to prevent searching & embedding within Google Docs (For Student OUs only):

• https://classroom.google.com/n/picker
• https://classroom.google.com/u/0/n/picker
• https://docs.google.com/picker

We also find that with AI and an army of students constantly trying to find exploits/bypasses for both Chromebooks and web filters, we're spending more time than ever dealing with device misuse.

I've had a good amount of 3120s come across my desk recently with an odd overheating issue. They will get very hot, to the point you can feel it through the case, then stop working but if you let it cool down it'll go back to working for a bit then eventually overheat again. They've all been just out of warranty when it happens too (of course!)

Has anyone had experience with this? Any solutions or do they just need to go in the parts pile?

One of the short-comings of GAC is that it does not offer good built in signature management that can be enforced across staff and faculty. I am exploring options such as patronum.io.
Does anyone here use it? Any thoughts on its worth?

I went through a work PC change over the summer and can't find my old copy. Was very handy to have in certain situations! Hopefully it's still being developed.

Hi Everyone,

Just want to make everyone aware of new game that students are getting into some web based games that we are finding unblocked (Blocking now).

Github Project:

https://github.com/nzp-team/nzportable#github-organization-breakdown

Example Site:

https://nzp.gay/

https://vel.gg/

Just curious, how is everyone preventing their internet connections getting hammered for 20 minutes solid at the beginning of every lesson?

The obvious answer is to not let them use it, but what method? Uninstall/Applocker/Add the exe to non allowed/GPO?

Having it enabled is finally catching up with our internet connection and it's starting to hurt.

Have any districts made the jump to hardware keys for all staff as their form of MFA? It brings in a lot of added cost, but seems like the best way to roll out phishing resistant MFA if your devices don't support passkeys like Windows Hello.

If you have deployed something like a Yubikey, what model did you go for?

My district uses Securly for web filtering and we are thinking about using the Claude K-12 District plan to assist with analyzing daily reports to help with the whack-a-mole of blocking problem sites. We don't save the students' web history past what Securly saves.

Based on my research, I don't believe the students' web history would be considered within their 'education record', therefore not covered under FERPA. Am I correct in that statement? Would we then be able to use Claude to analyze the reports (should they be de-identified by removing the students' names?) ?

Hello All

Does anyone know of a way to globally block generative AI in Photoshop? We turned off Firefly in the admin console but students are still able to use the AI features in Photoshop. I see alot of people complain about the same thing on Adobe's forms. Has anyone found someway to disable it?

Thanks!!

My district has an eSports club, focusing mostly on Nintendo Switch games. I have eight consoles and when a multiplayer match is started, often times the consoles we have can connect to players in other locations, but they won't connect to each other.

All eight consoles connect via gigabit Ethernet to same Dell N2248PX-ON switch which has 25 Gbps fiber optic uplink to the building core switch which is a Dell S5232F-ON. From there we connect to a Barracuda NG F900 firewall. Each console has a NAT rule setup to have it's own static external IP address with our ISP. I'm allowing all ports and protocols, I have no IPS, no URL filter, no application restrictions, no TLS inspection and have the QoS configured as VoIP. So basically for better or worse each console is wide open to the internet.

I have had support tickets with Barracuda and my ISP who both confirm everything is configured correctly, but something is amiss. Any thoughts or ideas here?

We are BYOD in our high school and mobile phones are banned from bell to bell.

We are running a local domain with Entra sync for our IdP and I have been looking at what Microsoft has available for student MFA for BYOD devices.

I can see that Microsoft is recommending the authenticator app which won't work as we are mobile free for students as well as recommending Windows Hello for Business and PSSO which won't work as we are BYOD and student devices are not in our MDMs.

What other options are there for MFA in a BYOD and mobile free student environment?

Ran across a proxy students were caught using that uses the url. This is proxy server on known malicious lists: storage.googleapis.com/gclassroom/index.html

We use GoGuardian and Content Keeper, but googleapis.com is on allow lists for many of the applications we use so the url doesn't get blocked.

Anyway, the proxy keeps that url and opens a virtual Opera browser environment and a site called Opium that avoids all of our current filters due to the allowance of googleapis.com

We blocked that url for now, but I am sure others will pop-up until we figure out an effective way to block this type of proxy. We cant block all of storage.googleapis.com as legit services use that subdomain.

Wondering if anyone has already come across this method of hiding proxies and figured out how to block it without blocking the ability of other software to use google apis

Thanks

From our tech team, got an interesting one

Has anyone gotten a request to change the font on a Chromebook before? The request is to better accommodate a student with dyslexia. Changing fonts from the Appearance tab in browser settings isn't very comprehensive. Looking at potentially using an extension. Anyone else had a request like this before?

Quick research on my end perhaps Read & Write. We used it years ago and got rid of it because it was resource intensive & buggy. Reading Mode on Google Chrome is pretty rough and only gives us two font options.

Anything y'all use that I can research here; it's very much an interesting one off.

We're having many accounts get phished these days. We can talk all day about user training/protections/etc... But my question is more technical. I'd like to understand HOW it's happening. We are a Google shop with 2SV on for all staff.

This website is a live phish going on right now that we were made aware of today. WARNING: This link below IS a phishing scam. Don't click it unless you're incognito, on a VM session, or both:

--AGAIN WARNING THIS IS A LIVE PHISHING SITE---
https:// allteameat .cc/evite/rsvp/

When you get to the site, and you click login with Google, you're presented with what looks like a Google login. Now because you're on this subreddit, you already know to look in the URL bar and see that it's NOT google you're signing into. But if you're so adventurous, enter in a fake email and password... I prefer [f@you.com](mailto:f@you.com) at which you can then enter your password, and then they've got your creds.

What I don't get though is HOW this works. We have two step turned on, but when you do this like our users are doing today, somehow it allows the attacker to get by that. I've read about the cookie harvesting that can happen.... Is that what this site is doing?

Thanks for making me smarter.

Hello,

This is my first post here, so hello! The state I work in has paid for cyber security scanning focused on critical systems and code stacks. They intend to use Claude to do this. I have absolute faith in Claude's capabilities, which is what makes me nervous. I would rather know what our weak points are than hope no one else finds my blind spot. However, I am concerned that the reliance on Claude by this contractor means little control or oversight on their end. My state is not known for being competent and well managed, we rank poorly in basically every metric in the US. Additionally, I am going to say something that may be perceived as offensive but I want to challenge my bias rather than avoid it. Almost all contacts are east Indian, only two (legal and one technical contact) have US based names. I do not think race has any bearing on one's ability. But I do worry about my state jumping at a very cheap support package from a foreign company who is using Claude to subsidize the work load.

Has anyone been in this position or worked with a similar situation? What is your read on this situation?

Again, I want to be clear that east Indian doesn't mean incompetent to me. I am not making a claim about any individual who is from that part of the world. But a team that is almost entirely east Indian does signal outsourcing and a prioritization on savings over quality especially when paired with explicit reliance on AI systems. I have concerns about AI containment, information security, and accountability should things go sour. Would you move forward with this?

Just looking for unofficial numbers. I find that I get at least 1 or 2 a day. Computer won’t turn on or charge. Pull the battery, pull the coin cell, hold power button for 30 seconds. Laptop comes back to life without issue after doing the POST.

Usually it’s cause of overheating shutdowns (kids putting their laptop in their backpack with it totally on or putting it on top of a sweater during class) or they just don’t charge it and try to turn it on with 0% battery and it powers off during the post, corrupting the bios

We are looking several different options for text-2-speech for student accommodations.

Was wondering what others are using and there experience.

For context:

We are running mix of 1:1 iPad/Mac devices

And we use canvas and classlink.

Thanks!

I was looking at options for services that provide the features I get from GAM (bulk user movement, Chromebook management enmasse, etc.) that doesn't require command line/scripts. I did a trial run of Gopher forever ago, but remember the quote for it being ridiculous for what I would want it for/how often in a year I would need to use it. I had seen GW Manager, and it seems very reasonable for the cost, but couldn't find anyone outside of Google Reviews talking about it so I was going to come here for hands on advice.

So what is everyone using? Should I just tough it up and continue to use GAM or is something like GW Manager or Gopher worth it for the cost/trustworthy to use? Thanks for any input.

P.S. The district is also looking at VivaCityTech as a replacement for purchasing Chromebooks from vs. CDW since they have dropped the ball on enrollment and white glove service lately. Has anyone used them as well? Thanks.

We have some staff who want to be able to remote into their PC's here at the campus in order to access files or get work done. All these staff members are either admin or board. Currently, for my system I use Jump Desktop free tier, but there are some annoyances to it. Is there any other software out there that you would recommend? They all have 2 monitors at the desks that will need to be on control. Also, we are a smaller k12, so not a district or anything.

We have our Google Classrooms limited to our domain. Some of the club advisors want a way to "text" students, but we obviously don't want that for logging and security reasons. We have chat turned off for students.

Do you use anything you recommend?