We finished up the Technology portion of the State Monitoring and it seemed to go very well.  Dr. Parks was our reviewer and spent the entire day with us going through, in detail, our district technology plan and the process we used to write it.  She also covered the documentation for our EETT and ARRA technology grants. Although, we have gone through this before, I do not remember having to go through a "desk audit" and an onsite review.  It was extremely detailed, but we were ready.  Dr. Parks seemed very impressed with our vision of using the grants primarily for professional development for teachers to teach with 21st Century technology tools.  She was also impressed with the PLU that Vickey developed and is currently implementing for district administrators.  All in all, it was a stressful, but helpful exercise, however,I'm glad it is over with for awhile.

AETA Fall Symposium

Last week I attended the Alabama Educational Technology Association's Fall Symposium in Orange Beach, AL., and got a lot of information from the ALSDE regarding some new initiatives they are putting in place.  In addition to the Global Scholar and Alabama Insight programs, they also announced a new portal that will allow a single sign-in so you do not have to have a dozen passwords to get to the different protected sites on the ALSDE website.  Hopefully, they will have that up and running within the next year.

In addition to some excellent sessions, I was also able to visit the vendor area where I was able to look at the new Lenovo wireless slate.  Similar to an Ipad, it will be loaded with Windows 8 so we will be able to join it to our protected network.  It is also pen-enabled and comes with its own pen, plus it has a USB port, two slots for memory cards, and a connector that will allow it to be placed on a docking station and used as a desktop.  A lot of capabilities that are not available on the Ipads today.

Lenovo is also coming out with a new mini-desktop that is as fully capable as a regular desktop except it is about 1/4 the size.  Great idea as it will take up less room on the tables and can even be mounted underneath the table if you wanted.

I also spoke with Ryan Keag with Gaggle and they have a great product that I think our district should look at.  Along with a hosted student email program, they also have an online digital storage site where students could post their work and access it from anywhere they have Internet access.  I like their student email program because the schools are able to manage the access and monitor student use.

It was a great conference and it was good to visit with my fellow tech coordinators from around the state.  I think we get as much out of our dinner conversations as we do in the sessions.

SPAM

I don't know what is going on but it seems that the Spammers selected today as the day to send a bunch of junk to our district.  I have been sending emails out to all of our employees warning them and telling them to not click on any links and just delete the email.

You would think that after this many years with email, folks would understand about this kind of stuff, but we have had at least four incidents this year with employees who have clicked on a link and answered all the questions including username and password.  Of course, their account immediately became the address the spammers used and all the spam filters out there decided that our district was dangerous and black-listed us so any emails sent from our employees to addresses outside the district were blocked.  It takes a lot of work to get that cleaned up.  Normally, we find out that we have compromised when a teacher reports that their wife/husband was not getting their emails at their work.

I hate filling up everyone's mailbox with warnings, but I'm afraid that, if I don't, there will be that one person who believes that their mailbox will be deleted if they don't confirm their username and password.  I do, however, get a kick out of some of the responses I get.

Vickey's Instructions

I'm attending a Professional Learning Unit and our instructor has told us to post on our blogs several times over the next two weeks so we can get used to blogging.  So this is my first post.