There is no box
thinking out loud about technology, education and life
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Author: Andrew T Schwab
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If you’ve been following me for any length of time you may remember a rant a while back about the importance for school districts to embrace technology as a “real” department, going so far as to say a Cabinet level Chief Technology Officer or “CTO” was a key requirement to successfully infusing technology into a…
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Chrome has been a dog lately. Opening Gmail has been like watching paint dry with that little blue progress bar seemingly stuck forever between just getting started and not quite done. I vaguely recall some advice a while back about extensions being the known culprit in one or two Chrome slow down cases so today…
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Since June we have been using the Securly web filtering solution. It is a truly cloud based solution with no on-premise equipment and very tight integration with Google Apps for Education. I’m told LDAP integration is coming soon but for us, that hasn’t been a deal breaker since most of our users are on Mac…
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I’m an avid Chrome browser user. Chrome stole me away from Firefox back around ’09 just as Firefox had stole me (ok, more like rescued me) from Internet Explorer back in the early days of the web. Chrome was lean and fast and worked well. And when it didn’t, it had a sense of humor…
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Look what my school GAFE account is telling me: And letting my kids play in the backyard unsupervised is probably not a good idea either. Actually, this might be more helpful if it advised people to be careful about what they discuss internally.
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Having used Google Apps for Education since 2007, I’ve been through a lot with the platform. Whereas I used to look forward to the newest updates and the improvements to usability and stability they brought, I find myself dreading them lately. Mostly because the updates these days seem more about drastic UI changes than improved features…
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I spent yesterday morning in a Mobile Device Management shootout listening to a series of MDM vendors tell me they all did basically the same thing when it comes to MDM on iPads. The reason, or blame, is Apple’s APIs. The fact of the matter is, the MDM solutions can pretty much only do what…
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This year when our Lightspeed Rocket 1.0 box failed, we decided to dive head first into a hosted web filtering solution. We worked with Securly over summer on some custom requirements and after a few false starts, made the switch at the start of school. It’s not perfect and we’ve had some issues but then…
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I was thinking about backups the other day and realized we haven’t had any storage issues in a while. I’m sure that’s thanks to our relatively new Nimble Storage Array. I also find myself wondering why our wifi system can’t be more like the nimble. Human understandable GUI, cost effective, plays well with everything, just works…
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Cisco, HP, Ruckus, Meraki and now Aerohive. I’ve used a lot of wireless systems in my time and I’ve come to appreciate when wifi has just worked and practiced my cursing on systems that promised the sun with every future update and delivered something more like a florescent light bulb. For a time I deluded myself into…
There is no box 