Staff MacBook Email #1

Greetings Prairie Hawks! I’m excited to share that we are in the works of creating a plan for a FULL certified staff and Administrator MacBook replacement. Yes, you read that correctly, if you currently have a MacBook provided by CCSD you will be getting a new MacBook Air this summer!! The technology department has decided to upgrade everyone at the same time. We are doing that for a few reasons: To have all staff on the same make/model for troubleshooting and consistency. With our current fleet, we are currently supporting 4 different versions of Mac OS which makes problem solving issues more complex. To have all staff MacBooks “managed” with our management system, so we can push OS upgrades when we have tested them, keeping web browsers updated to the newest versions automatically, etc. The new MacBook Airs have USB-C connections only, so we will also be mass replacing all adapters for connections to projectors/monitors/etc. There are a few important items to pass along to you. As we have shared earlier - 32 Bit applications will not be supported on these new versions of Mac OS. That means no Mimio, Logger Pro, or older software. CCSD Technology department is NOT planning to mass replace Microsoft Office. We do understand there are some situations where Microsoft Office will be necessary. We are developing a process for request and Building Administrator Approval for Microsoft Office. More information to come. We will be developing a process for exchange for your new computer for summer. More information will be provided about that in the upcoming months. Please reach out with any specific questions, but know more information about the items above will be provided soon.

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Passwords - oh passwords!

We just recently sent this message to our staff: Greetings! In our continuing efforts to create a more technology secure environment, we are going to begin to enforce the following rules for STAFF passwords in Google. All passwords must be a minimum length of 12 characters. We recommend passwords that are passphrases, for example “ilovechipsandsalsa”. While we are enforcing a password length requirement, at this time we are not requiring complexity through special characters, or symbols, or upper case letters. All staff will be required to create a new password every 180 days. We will begin enforcing these policies on Wednesday November 16th. When you log into your Google account, you will be prompted to update your password. A few other items regarding this change. Infinite Campus passwords will not be affected. Teacher MacBook logins, office staff’s windows logins, any business office/HR logins, or other website logins will not be affected. Para tablets, chromebooks, or ot...

Campus update

We get new updates to Infinite Campus every couple of weeks. One of the newest updates now checks your password against known data breaches. If you password is one that is compromised, you'll get a notification like this when signing into Campus: In order to change your Campus password, you need to go to Account Settings in Campus Tools and select Edit your password.

Securly - how does it work?

I thought it would be good to post a bit about Securly, which is our web filter. We often get asked about this and sharing what it does and how it works around this time of year seems appropriate. This tool ensures that staff and students access appropriate content on the web. We filter in two ways. In our elementary buildings, content is filtered based up IP address. This is done to allow our young learners to not have to use a username and password to log into devices. The filtering is consistent with all devices in these buildings, no matter if staff or student. In our 5-12 buildings, staff and student sign into their Google accounts and filtering is done based upon their user group. We use Securly's certificate based dns filtering solution. This requires devices on our network to install a certificate or an extension to access the internet. Information about installing the certificate can be found at http://www.prairiepride.org/procedures/securly.php .

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