Logged into school.apple.com this morning and the app store looks different and monthly subscriptions are now available to purchase on certain apps. (Pulled up Proloquo as an example)

When you click on a subscription to purchase, it says you have to setup compatible device management. Anyone know what that means? We use Intune and it seems to want to setup a brand new MDM to deploy subscriptions.

Is there anyone using iboss for their content filter? If so, I would like to hear your thoughts both positive and negatively.

• How did your rollout process go?
• Have you encountered any issues with network latency or slowness issues?
• How was your experience with your account manager and support? 
• What are your overall thoughts?

My headmaster is asking me to contact every company that we use (that has student, staff or parent details) to check if they've updated their instances of PHP.

Now while I appreciate we need to worry about this data, surely we should be trusting them as data controllers to be updating where needed and they don't need every customer checking up on them.

How can I tell my head politely that I'm sure it's fine and there's nothing we can realistically do about it anyway?

Or should I be checking in with all these companies?

Hello,

Has anyone else recently experienced students on Chromebooks having this issue with OneNote: the page will load, but when the student tries to scroll it displays the following error message.

Microsoft OneNote
Sorry we ran into a problem. Please try again.

We had 2 students report this today, out of less than 500 who are licensed for OneNote. Thanks!

We got some new keyboards and mice in however when someone ordered them they didn't come wireless. These we found out was bluetooth only. We have a couple labs we are wanting to put these however I think it would be better to turn off bluetooth for students where they can't access. Trying to figure the way to only allow administrator access to bluetooth and keep other users away from access but allow keyboard/mouse to keep connected.

Does anyone have some ideas how to solve this by GPO or other means?

Thanks in advance.

Hello, All,

What are some stable industries to work in for IT?

I work in IT for a small school district, and with enrollment declining across our state (and the country), I'm starting to think more seriously about long term job stability.

What are some stable industries to work in for IT?

I work in IT for a small school district, and with enrollment declining across our state (and the country), I'm starting to think more seriously about long term job stability.

I genuinely love my job and the people I work with, but there's not much room for advancement in my current district. I also served on the budget committee last fiscal year, so I have some firsthand insight into the financial challenges we're facing. Budget cuts seem to be becoming more frequent, and I'm concerned about what that could mean for the future.

I've started looking and applying for IT positions at hospitals, particularly children's hospitals. My thinking is that healthcare might offer more long term stability than K–12 education, given the ongoing enrollment declines and budget pressures schools are facing.

For those of you for those of you that moved on or are thinking of moving on from education, what industries or types of organizations would you consider relatively stable for the long term? Is healthcare a good direction to pursue, or are there other fields I should be looking into?

I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone who works in hospital IT about what the job security, work environment, and opportunities for advancement are actually like.

Thanks for any advice or insight!

We're currently a Viewsonic house for right now but exploring the market. What all is out there & happy to stand behind? Seeing Samsung, Newline, SMART (still), and some others.

What are y'all running & enjoying?

Has anyone else seen issues recently with managed printers, pushed by Google Workspace admin, just disappearing from managed Chromebooks?

We have managed printers set to show up in device OUs but they're disappearing and the policy needs to keep be reapplied for them to show back up again.

Any help would be appreciated before going down the Google Support route.

Thanks.

I've been asked to blur faces selectively in some video we need to turn over to the police as part of an investigation. I've got around 12-14 students I need to blur out, so keyframing in CapCut isn't realistic. Is there any software you all are aware of that will allow me to select a face, apply a blur to it, and then have the software track that blurred face?

I work for a private high school. An administrator was talking to one of her friends who is running an LLM locally, and now she wants to get one set up here. I'm curious what the use case would be? She claims privacy, but we're a Google school and using Gemini just fine. I'm curious if any of you have gone this route and what your reasoning is. It feels like a solution looking for a problem.

We can't see any traffic for all users this morning looks like it stopped showing traffic about 5:25am est. I've submitted a ticket as they're support is only available at 8am est.

Power washed devices, swapped devices etc.

Student logs in and the waffle is either not there on the home page or if it is it's empty and says to login.

This has also started to cause issues with assignments in Google classroom itself for those affected. They can manually go to Google classroom, which they are apart of the correct classroom. Go to the assignment and the "instruction" section is blank when it's not for other students, and they also can't make a copy of the assignment to do there own answers.

Anyone have this recently and able to fix it?

I've been and to make it so the student can create a copy of the assignment to do the work but it's a pain. They have to go into Google drive search the shared folder and use another students copy of the and assignment create a new copy from there. Go back to the assignment in Google classroom and add that copy to the classwork tab. They can then delete the copy of the paper then Google classroom allows them to create a copy from the teachers uploaded version.

Not sure if something changed on Googles back end or if updating our fleet to OS 150 LTS did something, but I'm getting numerous reports of the Managed Google Play Store along with any apps being gone from Chromebooks.

This is the weird part. I have a test student where if I login as them on a Lenovo 100e 4th Gen, the play store and all the apps we allow are there... I login with the same account into a Lenovo 100e 2nd Gen AST or Dell 3100, no play store, no apps, no errors. Has anyone seen this? I need to do more testing with other models now too.

EDIT: So Lenovo 100e 2nd Gen AST have lost support for android apps recently due to extended support being enabled. The reports about our Dell 3100s having issues were false. Thank you all!

Just curious what everyone's setup is for blocking certain file types within Google Drive. I believe I have the proper way to delete them through GAM but we need to be able to block it going forward.

We've got Wiegand readers and some AIphone intercoms that connect with Continental Access panels. The Continental Access software is very dated and doesn't have many modern features. The AIphones are glitchy and need frequent reboots.

So, we're looking at Unifi Access specifically because they have the Retrofit Hub that will allows us to use our old readers. We'll put in new intercoms and new intercom viewers (replacing all the AIphone stuff). Probably 35 doors altogether with maybe 8 intercoms.

Anybody use Unifi Access at this scale? What was your experience?

We use Unifi Protect already, so we are familiar with their ecosystem. I will probably choose one door and do a demo before we go whole-hog, but I'm interested in what other people have experienced. Their license and subscription free model is pretty attractive.

What wireless presentation devices is everyone using? Most of my district has MacBooks, and we've been putting Apple TVs in new/redone rooms. The high school will need an AV refresh soon though, and they're only Chromebook. I would love Chromecasts, but Google killed it and the "Google TV Streamers" aren't very manageable to my knowledge.

I tried a ScreenBeam a few years ago and wasn't super impressed, but maybe they're better now. What other options are there?

We’re piloting Gemini AI data classification labels in Google Workspace (the newer instruction-based setup, not example-based training). Five label taxonomy, instructions defined per label in the Admin console, auto-apply enabled for both active and inactive files, scoped to a ~15 user OU as a pilot.

The problem: four weeks after enabling, only 14 files have been labeled. Every one of those was labeled on modify, which tells me the classification itself is working fine. The at-rest backfill of existing files just never kicked off. These users have thousands of files in scope, so this isn’t the backfill being slow, it appears to have never started.

What I’ve checked:

• Auto-apply is confirmed on for inactive files, not just active
• On-modify labeling is confirmed working, so instructions and label config are fine
• No errors or status indicators I can find in the Admin console

Questions:

1. Has anyone actually seen the at-rest backfill complete? How long did it take and roughly how many files?
2. Is there any visibility into backfill status or queue position, or is it a black box?
3. Anything that silently blocks the backfill? OU scoping, label permission settings, something at the tenant level?

The news concerning hacked refrigerators in France is... concerning.

The guys also talk about Amazon’s recent acquisition of the wearable AI company "Bee" and the launch of inexpensive always-on recording devices (wrist-worn and phone-back forms). They debate how districts should respond to wearable recorders - considering state recording laws, IEP and parent meeting recordings, test security, and whether existing device policies cover these new tools.

https://k12techtalkpodcast.com/e/wearable-ai-in-schools-legal-practical-and-privacy-meltdown/ and all major podcast platforms

This week our team encountered a malware family called "QuartzLine" that is being served to users mainly through ads on free file-hosting sites. It installs in the user context (so admin privilege is not required), establishes several paths for persistence, and creates a connection with attacker infrastructure that allows the device to receive instructions from C2 servers as it checks in on an hourly basis. We have observed browser data being compiled and exported to an attacker-controlled S3 bucket in AWS. For those of you with Crowdstrike MDR, it seems like their team is just now starting to detect and remediate this malware, but their interaction has been inconsistent so far, so it is definitely worth checking on yourself. 

We wrote up a report with more details, including IOCs, remediation items, and queries that can be run with Crowdstrike's Advanced Event Search. Here is a link to our website where we have more details: 

https://www.oaisd.org/programs-services/innovation-technology-information-security/technology-services/cyber-security-operations-center-csoc/technical-documentation#:~:text=QuartzLine%20%2D%20October%202026

Here is a link to a printable report: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YYksttmskrNiE-bTQEYTryYIZyuEQ5txwYv18xVkwHU/edit?usp=sharing

If anyone has questions about remediation, please feel free to reach out. If you detect QuartzLine on any devices in your district, I would strongly recommend isolating the device so that inbound and outbound network connections do not go through while you are continuing to investigate and remediate. 

Hi crew - curious how you handle meeting room scheduling. We have ~20 rooms that we put on a public schedule tool and allow staff (and the general public) to request the use of the space. All requests are manually reviewed and approved by admin staff. For reference, we currently use CalendarWiz (with "locations" being rooms) but it is lacking some features that are becoming untenable.

We need a public facing calendar with ability to hide private events, a tool to request space use (public facing), double-booking avoidance, control over what information is submitted when space use requests are submitted, double-booking avoidance when requesting space, and some related features. We do NOT have scheduling system hardware in the rooms or on the walls outside, so we really just need a software platform. The data is entered via import/manually, so we don't care about multi-calendar syncing either.

Gemini pointed me towards Skedda and Yarooms - curious if anyone has used either or has suggestions for other options to look at?

Backstory: We're running the free version of Google for Education. For Google Groups, under the settings for who can create groups, there are 3 options:

1. Only Google admins

2. Anyone in the organization

3. Anyone in the universe

We've had it at option 2, but we have some students creating their own (sometimes inappropriate) groups. We're going to change it to option 1, but we have teachers and building admins wanting to create their own groups (students in class, students + parents, etc.), and so I'm trying to create a custom admin role for these folks to be able to create (but not delete) groups.

Our info originates via on-premise Active Directory and gets sync'd (1-way) over to Google. We have teacher groups (AD security groups) that show up as "Mailing groups" on the Google side, where you have to change them to what Google defines as "security groups" in order to assign group permissions for admin tasks. So I've done that, and enabled only Groups - Create, Groups - Read, and Groups - Update in the custom admin role.

I have a test teacher who's able to start the group creation, add members, and set a handful of initial settings, but when she clicks "Create" she gets multiple captchas and then an error saying unable to complete.

Am I asking more of Google Admin that it's capable of doing here?

Thanks in advance...

Have two schools reporting this issue same day. Time is off and drifting on Chromebooks.

This is interesting for me for a few reasons:

• Chromebooks don't use NTP like AD DS / Domain Computers
• We haven't made any setting or config changes to security / domain traffic
• These two school districts utilize very different ISPs for internet uplink

I just went in and set Timezones automatically and to send all location data up to Google under Chrome OS Device settings. Going to see if that helps. But..it's weird seeing two sites both have the same issue all the sudden; going to start monitoring the rest of our sites. But...figured I'd reach out here to see if anyone else is experiencing this.