Internet Bandwidth

Greetings Prairie Hawks!

As we've shared over the last 2 weeks, we're reaching our internet bandwidth cap that our firewall will allow us through during portions of days. He's a picture of our usage from the last week (notice the high usage on Wednesday, yesterday)

Yesterday, as you can see in the graph, the bandwidth was very high compared to previous days. We received reports that elementary teachers could not access the required FAST system for required progress monitoring.

We've tried a variety of mitigation strategies by blocking cell phones from connecting to our wireless network (Xirrus) in certain high use buildings, to blocking certain websites through our content web filter (iBoss) such as streaming media (Netflix, Disney Plus, etc).

We do have a few requests at this time. Please limit the consumption of streaming video (YouTube). If you're showing a video for student learning, show it one time on your projector screen instead of having each student stream their own videos.

If you are a user of GoGuardian, you'll know that we turned it off for a short period of time to examine its impact on the network. If you continue to use GoGuardian, please use it to limit student usage. We are seeing portions of the network strained hard when students are in studyhalls, or during unstructured times.

Our current firewall is like a garden hose connected to a fire hydrant (Thanks Sam Ketchum for this analogy!). We are working with the vendor of our new firewall that was just recently purchased and pushing them to have full installation as soon as possible. This will make our connection larger to the Internet and allow for more traffic to move through. Until we get this implemented we ask that each user watch what they are doing (Think similar to saving the environment, if each person does a little it all adds up!)

We'll continue to monitor and will provide updates every few days. Thanks for your patience!

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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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