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In Search of Catholic School Excellence
Exploring the programs, people, and practices making a difference in Catholic education. Join host Thomas Boles as we hear from principals, teachers, and innovators shaping the future of Catholic schools. Whether you're a leader looking for ideas or an advocate for Catholic education, this show is your guide to what’s working—and why it matters.
Be sure to check out the show notes, as each episode comes with a companion guide to help you implement the ideas discussed during the episodes.
Thomas Boles: Welcome to In Search of Catholic School Excellence, the show where we spotlight the program's, people, and practices making a real difference in Catholic education today.
If you're a school leader striving to build a community of faith, excellence, and innovation, you've come to the right place.
Each episode brings you ideas that are working, stories that inspire and new possibilities for your school's mission.
Let's explore what's working.
And what's possible.
Hi folks.
Welcome back.
This week we're talking about school technology checklist.
I was just thinking that after we've talked about all these admission things, we've been talking about some of these other topics that, you know, making sure that we've got those basics in line is so important.
So we had published this school technology checklist a couple years ago, and we wanted to share it with everybody here.
But it might make sense for us to go through it because it may not make sense outta context.
So today I'm joined by Becky Wong, and we're gonna discuss this checklist.
So, Becky, I know that you did a good deal of the work, in fact, like, like 92.9% of the work on this.
why should somebody be looking at this checklist and what, why does this checklist come about?
Becky: Oh yes.
So every year, especially the beginning of the school year we'll have new techs or a new person at a school and they'll ask for like, oh, hey, what's the new tech curriculum?
what do I need to know?
And this is the essential guide, super basic, but something to run down every year.
It doesn't have to be in the beginning of the school year.
Could be the middle of school year after all the craziness happens.
But it's definitely something to check annually or even every few months to say, Hey, where are we?
Another good time to check is that the end of the year so you could prepare for the next school year.
And these are things that just helped the school run.
And I know a lot of times people might run away from it because it costs money, but think of how much better it'll be when things work versus, oh no, the internet's down.
The kids can't get on star testing.
So these are definitely things to check on before you have a big event like standardized testing, report cards, teaching in general, everything.
Thomas Boles: And most of this stuff is about access too, right?
So, you know, making sure that the right people have access to the thing.
So are the things working?
That's the, a good chunk of the checklist, but also do the right people have access, right?
And so I think that's what we want to highlight here, that, you know, most importantly, you've gotta have your principal have access, right?
And then there might be some other people that are involved in that.
So.
Becky: Oh, definitely.
So, let's go over the four major, like areas that we need to look at.
Access is the number one thing on the list.
A second is infrastructure, you know, just networking, like what's on hand device wise.
And then that leads to device.
It's a lifecycle.
Hey when we're take doing star testing, are our iPad's too old?
We don't wanna find out the day before testing that star testing's not supported on your device or your, like your Chromebook.
And lastly, funding, like how do we get.
The money or where do we raise the money to fund all these things so that it's not super expensive in one year.
But back to what you were saying about access, definitely start with, you know, the major things, who has Google admin access.
Make sure there's at least two people for every essential app or service.
The principal definitely should be, you know, the super admin on your on your Google admin.
I think the second thing, make sure your web domain, basically your school address.
For the internet, make sure that's updated and that you have access to it.
I know when I first started as a tech coordinator one thing that was very unfortunate is that the past principal passed away and he was the only one that was on the account.
So I had to contact the provider, I think it was like network solutions or something like that.
And we had to turn in all sorts of paperwork to make sure that it gets switched over to the new principal and in the office or myself.
So we don't want just one person having access.
Then, you know, when a renewal comes up, who's gonna re renew?
If your web domain goes down, then you might not have access to your, you know, your email.
And that's happened before.
Thomas Boles: Yeah, so I, I think a good point about that is, you know, sometimes we definitely want the principal to have access to everything.
They are the ruler of the school, if you will.
They're the president of everything.
They should have access to everything,
but sometimes that principal may not feel so tech savvy.
So one of the ways, and this is a shout out to Zoltan Bley of SPES technologies who is talking about, you know, security for our organizations.
And one thing that he does with his clients is he'll write all the passwords down for that super admin for that principle, put 'em in envelope and seal it.
And they take that envelope and you put it like in the vault and.
The principal, therefore would have access to all of those things, but they're not gonna have that sitting on their computer on a post-it on their computer so that anybody can get in.
It's in a safe place.
And you know, the trick with the ceiling of the envelope, which I thought was pretty genius, is if he asks in a, you know, some sort of at risk situation, he ask for that envelope and it's broken, then he knows that somebody in-house did something.
Right.
But I love that idea of, you know, you gotta make sure that the people who are in charge have access, but they don't necessarily need to have that, like, sitting on their phone or, you know, having their account lit up with all of those accesses.
So that, I think that's a really good way of looking at it.
Perhaps we have a third account with all of that access that is not directly that principal's account.
Becky: Oh, for sure.
And it's just and you've seen it too, where people lose access to their website, you know, the email addresses.
But those are definitely things to shore up.
But one trick is set a Google Calendar reminder, like annually, remind yourself, okay, maybe even check the school safe.
Hey, is that envelope still there?
Did it get moved?
Where did it go?
Did it get open?
Right?
And it could be at the end of the year too to make sure, because if anything, if there's a transition in leadership or transition in office staff or whomever, it's there and we'll all say, oh yeah, don't forget the envelope.
Pass that along.
But do you set a calendar reminder for like, renewal dates?
And it's not necessarily at the beginning of the school year, end of the school year, January, December for like, your domain could be licenses to your textbooks or whatnot, just have a calendar reminder.
Thomas Boles: It's a good idea to have that calendar.
Also be maybe a third, you know, under a different address
so that, you know, multiple people are access to it and it's not directly stuck to that one person's account.
So that way that all the people are involved can be notified.
And that's, you know, whether you have your tech person, your tech team picking up on that calendar and just as a reminder, like, Hey, principal, time to renew, or the principal does it themselves, or the other admin.
Just a good idea to have multiple people on that and have it not tied to one person's account because if that calendar goes away, when that person leaves.
Then you've also missed out.
So, you know, we love using service emails for these kinds of things where they're gonna persist long after any one user.
So that's a great way of doing it.
I like that calendar reminder.
Becky: The last thing about access and calendar reminders what I did is that I put a note link to a Google Doc so that it's not like renew domain and someone says, what is that?
It, there's a link to it and it goes to a Google doc or a spreadsheet.
And I did this with a textbook renewal because.
It's such a pain.
Like where, so every year around, I forget, was it March?
Here's a reminder order textbooks, here's a spreadsheet, and you don't have to go hunting for things.
So Google Calendar reminders, link it to a Google Doc or some sort of spreadsheet so that you're people know what it is, like what is
Thomas Boles: Definitely good idea.
You know, we always talk about the you know, storing of that kind of sensitive information and whether that's, you know, everybody should have a password manager at this
point, but maybe you store that link to that document and the password manager or that document, just having a document that is centralized, that all of that stuff is in there.
Maybe don't keep your passwords inside that document, but you keep the links to everything inside that document.
And that can be, you know, the thing that gets passed from person to person as needed.
Becky: Oh, and we had a discussion about this, especially because a lot of people reach out to us about access.
Please do make sure that the two people that you have that have access are school employees.
Because a lot of times we do have parent volunteers that are experts in their field and they're, they offer to help you build a website for free, or they offer to, you know, set something up.
I know in the last episode I talked about Salesforce, a parent set that up for us, but then the parent left and then there's no one that knows what to do with it.
So same thing in terms of access.
It's nice that we do have parent volunteers, but we have to make sure it's a school staff member.
Thomas Boles: And if that parent is helping us, that's one of those accounts.
But we have, you know, those two on staff that can be the backups and I think it's good.
You mentioned having the two and having two on staff because.
You know, God forbid something happens to somebody and then we lose that access.
But there's also, we've had a recent situation where, you know, someone was even gone for a while and not accessible.
Therefore all of the things that they were controlling or, you know, on hold.
So that, you know, makes it very difficult if you don't have multiple access to those things for somebody in school.
And if somebody leaves, you just gotta make sure, and that's that calendar reminder helps out make sure that we've got that next person in line so we can add them to that list.
Becky: Well, speaking of access, a different kind of access is like infrastructure.
Ask your teachers, ask your students like, Hey, how's the connection?
How's the wifi in the building?
You know, we can have all the accounts and the most, like UpToDate, latest, fancy computers, but if your network infrastructure can't support all this new gear or the amount of gear you have, then that's just gonna go to waste.
You have like $2,000 computers, but if your network infrastructure is like weak, then that's not gonna go anywhere.
Thomas Boles: Yeah,
you definitely, you want to have more is better.
It's, you know, you equate it to having a freeway and if that freeway is only two lanes, you know, there's only a certain speed that you're gonna be able to get and you pump a bunch of cars through there, it's gonna be very difficult.
So the more lanes we have.
The easier it can go, and not everybody can go, you know, keeping this car analogy going.
Not every car can go 200 miles an hour, so therefore you want to have the lanes, more lanes so that nobody is fighting with each other in that.
And that's, you know, we talk about congestion on a network, you just have too many people trying to use the same lanes.
And if you have more lanes, it allows for all that to happen.
So the more bandwidth you have the more devices can be on that network, even if they're not all going 200 miles an hour, right?
They can be, you know, riding their Prius nice and slow on that freeway and and not bothered by the cars that might be wanting to whiz by.
So that, that's where it is.
And I think we get wrapped up in more and more, you know, there's two sides to the more and more, more.
One, some devices can't handle that speed, so maybe more is not necessary.
But if you can get as much as you can in an affordable price.
You might as well, because that just opens up your freeway to more lanes.
And I think right now, like most of the folks or internet providers can get you a gig or close to it.
And for not that much.
I know that Comcast or if you're a Spectrum customer from somewhere else in the country, like they're limited or they're limiting and it's costing, you know, a little bit more for that.
So we have some folks at like 600 that might work out for them and no one device is gonna see 600 except for maybe your brand new cell phone, but that's gonna open up enough roads.
Now we do have a school, we've had a school that had 800 devices on only a hundred down.
So it is possible, and if the network is built well then it can handle it, but more is better.
Becky: So what are your recommendations for like the minimum and also in terms of like equipment, like how many access points, what's a good in terms of like placement?
Thomas Boles: Sure.
As far as the minimum, you want to get at least a hundred down.
I know that you can operate on less than that, but a hundred down on a small school would work out nice.
As we mentioned, we do have a school that has 800 devices that was running on a hundred down.
They sent since upgraded and, you know, no problems there.
But that a hundred down is, allows them to at least do the bare minimum of what they need.
Right now, most internet providers don't give you what do they call it?
Synchronous speeds.
So the a hundred down would usually come with a 15 up.
And the Comcast Spectrum users, you know, you're probably looking at like a 600.
Down and a 40 up.
And we would love to get to those service providers that can give us synchronous so that the up and down is the same number.
Here in the Bay Area, we've got a handful of companies that can do that.
We've got Sonic and Monkey Brains and a few others that will give you, you know, 200, 200 or a gig and they're relatively inexpensive.
But if you're out in the middle of you know, a farming community or something like that, and it's a little bit harder than you just gotta take what you can get.
But ideally, you're gonna get to at least a hundred as far as the access points goes.
You know, all the buildings that we're working on in here were built in the, you know, pre fifties era.
And so they are dense as all dense can be concrete is crazy.
Wifi doesn't like concrete, it doesn't like glass and it doesn't like water.
So if you can keep your wifi away from those three things, it's great.
Now, obviously in the classroom.
You have windows, but if you're not trying to use the signal through the window, then you're fine.
So what we try to put one access point in each room.
And the rule of thumb is if you can see it, you can feel it.
Right?
So if you can't see that access point from where you are in that room, it's probably gonna be a weak signal or no signal.
But if you keep it within view, you can probably get access to it.
Becky: Oh, yeah.
Because sometimes having too many access point is bad too, but depending on the structure of the building, you know, can it be, it's not like a house where, you know, mostly thin walls made from wood, but schools are definitely a different ball of wax.
Tell us more about like firewalls and content filtering.
Why do we, why do schools need that?
Thomas Boles: So yeah, after you've got access and you've got things working, you might need to have some security on it, right?
And so the.
The basic firewall.
The idea behind a firewall is that it keeps the bad guys out and lets the good guys through and allows your users to use the internet safely.
Nothing is foolproof, but a good firewall will allow for those things to happen.
And sometimes included the firewall, you get a filter, which will keep kids off of bad websites.
And it allows you to separate your network into different networks so that kids can be on one network that might be more heavily
filtered than what the staff or faculty would be on, but the firewall allow 'em to do that, and the filter will then block those sites.
It's important to, to have those things in place.
It can be a very simple firewall if you're not so worried about it, but as our cyber security issues keep growing we may be looking at more and more advanced firewalls.
And I, if you don't have somebody on site who can handle that, reach out to somebody in the community who can do that.
And this is where.
You may not wanna lean on a parent for your access.
So if you're looking for an IT company, I know a couple good folks who can do these kinds of things but at the same time it's good to have a professional who can manage that for you.
And there's a lot of great companies out there that will manage it for a fee instead of having you to put out a big chunk of change.
'cause typically with those higher security settings, there's gonna be a yearly subscription and that yearly subscription can be like, you know, 3000 plus dollars on top of a $3,000 device.
But some of these companies will do that for a monthly fee of like a hundred dollars or $200 or whatever it might be, which is a much easier way to do it and somebody else's problems keeping you secure.
So that's, you know, always food for thought, but it's important.
Make sure you have a firewall, make sure you have a content filter to keep your kids safe.
Becky: about content filtering.
I do get a lot of requests from principals where I just got one like 20 minutes ago saying, Hey, kids can get onto Minecraft or get onto whatever website, you know, some gaming website.
And these sites pop up very frequently and kids find ways to get through your your firewall filtering, whatnot.
So like you said, having someone help you manage it would be such a relief because kids just get into stuff.
And one thing to use their devices for learning not to play games.
Thomas Boles: Yeah.
And that's, you know, going back to those filters if the student network's filtered and the network is not filtered.
And kids get on that faculty network, you've got all kinds of problems.
So that's why we don't want passwords, you know, on people's laptops posted in the room.
For those faculty networks especially.
What really should happen in a perfectly designed network, nobody would have passwords.
Those, there'd be profiles on everyone's devices that will allow the access or not access.
And if you're really fancy, you know, depending on how, what your email is, you would get access to the internet or a different level of internet.
So those are more advanced, but, you know, changing the password periodically and making sure that password is not posted all over the universe it's very easy to set up a guest network so people can be on that guest network.
I would still filter the guest network, but that's the network that people can put their phones on and kids can potentially, you know, if they leave the school network to join a different network, they can join that, that one and still be safe.
Becky: I've done in the past where we even made temporary guest networks for like festivals where it might be, you know, parent volunteers.
So it's not the standard guest network for the school.
we'll just put it up for a fall festival and just take it back down after they done using it so that, you know, passwords get passed around and we don't want just any random person to have it.
And lastly about infrastructure documentation, it's not fun, but it's so helpful because we go to so many different schools, you know, when we step in, we're like, where's the network closet?
Where's the modem?
If you had documentation troubleshooting, tech supporting and response will be so much faster.
Thomas Boles: Yeah it's definitely not fun, but having that network map is huge.
We just got a call this morning about that and not having a port plugged in somewhere.
Becky: Okay, for a copier.
Thomas Boles: On a system that you know has been upgraded.
And so you've not having that map makes it very difficult to figure out what where things go.
And, you know, if you don't have the historical knowledge, then that documentation is everything.
So when you're passing something along to the next person, it's huge to have.
And if you don't have that network map, reach out to your tech provider and ask 'em to do it.
You know, it might cost a few hundred dollars to get that done because they gotta go and check everything and put it into, you know, into a report for
you that you can put into a binder, which you can also save in that shared Google drive or that, you know, tech bible that we talked about earlier.
Whatever it might be, you want that information so that when it comes time to upgrade or do something else, that they're not starting over from scratch.
'cause if every time you have a network upgrade, a tech vendor comes in, that has to remap the whole network.
It.
That's just silly, but if you can hand them that after doing it once, then they can see everything very quickly and make the assessment very quickly.
No need to charge you extra for that.
Becky: Oh yeah.
And definitely like our situation this morning is very simple.
They move the copier from one room to another room and then they're like, oh, we're just gonna plug it in.
That didn't work because that port wasn't active.
So how great would it be if we had documentation?
Oh yeah, that goes with port 20, go into the network cloud and make sure port 20 is plugged in.
And just a simple plugging a cable and you know, office, even the teacher can do that.
So yeah, totally essential.
It's painful, but it is also very painful when teachers are like, we can't print to the copier now, and they have to wait, you know, till tomorrow.
And you know, as a teacher back in the day, it's like sometimes we're short one copy of for the test and it's annoying when you can't make that one copy.
Right.
Speaking of security and data, that's like the next thing on the list.
Like, your student information system like who's managing that?
You know, is it just one person?
Again, can't just be the principal.
You know, we want someone on staff.
Doesn't have to be the office too.
He should be a dedicated person that can onboard a new family when, you know, a student comes in midyear or maybe like a week later, like who's managing that information.
And then also in terms of like backup, do you have a backup for all the student data?
Thomas, what are your recommendation for backups?
Thomas Boles: Well, obviously if you're a Google School or a Microsoft school you have that shared.
Kind of drive situation where you can save a copy of that there.
But for this kind of information, you wanna make sure that it's secure and it's not accessible to anybody.
The computers that all the stuff lives on needs to be backed up.
Now, if you're using a cloud service, they may or may not have backups.
And so that may be something you ask your student information system about.
Do you have a backup?
And what do we need to do every summer to make sure that data's backed up?
So we typically will back up, you know, the grade books and the report cards and attendance and those types of things.
But you want to keep that stuff.
The real one that I worry about is we have the student information system, but before it gets into the student information system, there's typically some sort of database that lives on an office computer.
And that might be a spreadsheet, it might be something more sophisticated like FileMaker Pro or Airtable.
But that data that gets put in at the very beginning, new student comes in, all this stuff gets typed in.
Ideally it's all going directly into that student information system, but we know that there are documents and folders and all this other stuff containing student information on those computers in the office.
And so we wanna make sure A, that those computers are secure and b, that they're backed up.
And so if you're doing a local backup, you know, a simple time machine or Windows backup to those machines on a physical hard drive is great.
And then using something like a Crash Plan Pro or back blaze on those office computers to make sure that stuff's backed up somewhere else.
And without going too far down the road of backups, we want to have the rule of thumb is the 3, 2, 1 plan.
You wanna have three copies with two identical copies, and one of those has to be offsite.
So you want to have, you know, that being the cloud or on another computer offsite.
If your school goes down in flames that you haven't lost all that stuff.
Or if the computer that the stuff lives on dies, that it doesn't die with it.
Because if the computer and the local backup both died in the same power outage,
Becky: Oh yeah,
Thomas Boles: you are stuck.
So, make sure you got three copies, two identical, and one of 'em offsite.
And that for the most part, you can do those things and you know, the backup software, I know it's never fun to pay for stuff that you never look at, but you know, the backup software I use is like $8 a month and you know, back blaze is like $5 a month.
If you told me I could get back all of my sensitive data, like all of my data for like a hundred dollars a year, it would cost me a hundred dollars to get my data back.
I'd be like, yes.
You know,
Becky: yeah, for sure.
Like how many times did someone say, oh no, I lost all my photos.
If you had a back and those things are priceless, you'll never be able to get that back.
So it's might be pretty annoying to, you know, have to pay monthly $20 or whatnot for your backup, but that's going to be totally worth it when data is lost, your hard drive crashes or whatnot.
Thomas Boles: Yeah.
And even at the teacher level, like even if you're not an admin and you're not dealing with like really sensitive stuff, just having your local backup.
If you're on a Mac, you've got the iCloud drive, like storing stuff in there.
Dropbox three terabytes is like 150 bucks a year still, I mean.
It's not much to protect your stuff.
So it may not mean you know the world to the school that you lost your lesson plans, but it means the world to you.
So whatever you, whatever your pictures, whatever they are, that is important to you, make sure that there's a service that you can use to get on that.
And, you know, Google Drive will work fine to a certain extent, but there's certain limits to that.
And so you want to have something else.
Becky: Yeah, especially as from a teacher's perspective, you know, you spent time writing that.
Curriculum map where you spent time writing that lesson hours and it's lost and you can't get that back.
That's like soul crushing.
And speaking of Google Drive, it is one of my favorite backups because it's free, it's pretty reliable, but you still have to be careful with Google Drive especially because it's so easy to share.
Had a situation a few months ago where one user was cleaning out their Google Drive and was deleting documents, but it was a shared drive with other members of the office staff or volunteers, and they lost everything.
So they reached out to me like, Hey, you know, we lost all these really important document.
It was like festival information.
And I was like, oh, when did this happen?
It was beyond the 25 days of recovery.
I couldn't help them get anything back and they're like, oh no, you know, can't you contact Google?
I'm like, I did, but they told me the same thing.
If it's beyond the 25 days, there's no way of recovering it and as much, yeah.
Thomas Boles: that's a great point too though, that like these companies are aware that the data is important and they've put in some fail safes to make sure that we don't, you know, blow ourselves up.
But, you know, when we're beyond those fail safes, I mean, 25 days later that all of your stuff is gone, it's a totally understandable situation where you didn't even realize it was happening and now it's gone.
But, you know, we've gotta be a little bit more on top of those things, and that's where those backups come in place.
You know, one of our services, you know, has that backup and it just keeps it, you know, forever, even after it's been deleted, that stuff is sitting there.
So.
If that's in place, then the 25 days doesn't matter that much, but we have to work within the confines of those deals.
It should not, unless you're paying for it, you're not gonna get forever backup for free.
So you gotta learn.
Learn how to take care of these things and work within their constraints.
But it's good to know that they're at least giving us something so that we can recover when we do have the, oops.
Becky: Oh, definitely.
And I know it's wasn't malicious.
It was just like, oh, I don't need these photos.
I don't need this.
Thomas Boles: Exactly.
Becky: In terms of backup and data other things to consider is like setting up the data itself.
Like for academic services and applications like rostering, that's like a big deal.
It's you and I do that a lot, especially over the summer right before school starts.
What are some strategies to managing that and making that easier?
It's very painful.
You have
Thomas Boles: painful.
Becky: 16 new students now.
They all need new accounts.
Thomas Boles: Yeah, I think that goes back to that database.
So one is there a local database at the school where those users are first coming into?
Because you know, you want to have that.
And ideally that stuff's getting uploaded in the student information system because we can do a lot once it's in the student information system.
And if you haven't already signed up for Clever or Class Link, one of those services, it's free to the schools, the vendors pay for it.
But it allows you to connect to those things.
And in some certain student information systems will allow you to connect to other products.
But these things like Class Link and Clever, and we use Clever almost exclusively they allow for that to happen with almost everything.
And so that becomes an automatic.
Up update amongst all of your services.
So when you do a lot of hard work to get that set up, this is definitely not a one person type sitting there doing something like you.
This is a team effort to get something like clever set up, but once it's set up, all of your services are up to date automatically all the time.
So that's what's huge.
So you know, number one, make sure you got your local database good and that's in the institute information system.
And then let's get that connected to a service like Clever or directly to whatever third party services so that is automatically updated.
You should not be manually updating any of these things and any of your vendors who are man making you manually update How long to get working on clever.
Becky: Oh yeah.
It's nice when we get new students, like in October or January, but to have to create an account, you know, and the five or six accounts, just like individually, it's very tasking, almost like setting up a whole roster for the class.
Speaking of classes, what are some learning management systems that teachers can use?
Thomas Boles: Yeah, so I think it's important to have some sort of digital delivery and the learning management system for the classrooms.
It's a great way to make sure that the, everyone's organized and the kids are getting everything they need.
So we usually push third through eighth grade.
We push Google Classroom 'cause that's free and beautiful.
If you're not a Google School, then you gotta look at something else.
But if you are a Google School, it's a wonderful way to organize data and help you kind of conceive how that class might work.
Allowing you to push stuff out to the kids and you don't have to tell them to type, you know, the super long email address Or website address, right?
All that stuff can be built into that system.
And then for the little ones, we really like Seesaw.
Although Seesaw has jumped up in price and some folks have jumped to like Tottle.
You know, there are lots of good products for that age group and Seesaw has worked out pretty well.
So you can still use their free version for the most part that works really well.
And their paid version, although it has I think, almost doubled in price it's still relatively affordable.
Becky: Yeah, and I used Seesaw in the past and the free version was like, sufficient.
And you know, it was great.
And if you wanted more, then look at the paid plan.
And what's great about both Google Classroom and Seesaw, not only we can, we deliver content to students where they're not just like Googling the website.
Oh yeah, we have to go to this website, and they're all over the place.
But what's nice is that students can turn in assignments, you can create assignments, give them directions especially for those who might not get the directions while you say it aloud.
It's nice.
That's right.
There helps the students who are absent or.
Students who might need more time for an assignments.
So yes, it's both are very good in terms of managing and giving students flexibility and teachers flexibility in terms of like, assignments and creating assignments.
Thomas Boles: Yeah, I, and I would push all school leaders out there.
You really should think about Google Classroom for your your faculty meetings so that information can be organized.
Any sort of service project type thing that can be organized that way.
Google Classroom's a wonderful way to put that, your pd for your faculty.
That's a wonderful way to put it out there.
And, you know, combining that with Google sites and, you know, things like Notebook, lm, you could really manage a lot of that communication with your staff in such an easy way.
So, look into it as an administrator for how you disseminate information to your staff.
It's a wonderful way to do it.
Becky: Oh yeah.
Especially if your school is going to through accreditation in the WASC or WCA accreditation because everyone's split up in teams anyways.
Like, hey, who's in charge of like Catholic identity?
You can create groups within and assignments within Google Classrooms so that you're not like following up on left and right and just shouting in the hallway like, Hey, did you finish this report?
Or everyone only meets during the faculty meeting to talk about it, but there's no hub, right?
Thomas Boles: Right.
There's no checklist.
You know, it's nice when you have a checklist somewhere to say like, oh yeah, we did get through those things here.
That stuff is, it's not, you know, lost in some sort of email chain.
So, you know, getting us out of the end, never ending email chain and into something a little bit organized is huge.
Becky: Oh, right, and you don't have to email each other the Word document and you're like, what's the latest copy?
And from I think I've been on like three wasps.
I'm usually the person who has to combine all the information, so how great it would it be to have it on Google Classroom and just access each of the groups in each of the written documentation for it and all the evidence.
It's very awesome stuff.
Speaking of talking to other people in the building communication is huge in terms of like, just thinking about your overall tech communication with your staff, communication with your families
Thomas Boles: Probably the most important.
Becky: Yes.
Most important.
What are some safety protocols where tech can help, or like tech can be integrated so that it will help you in terms of like emergencies, like what have you seen people use?
Thomas Boles: Well, let's go back to first.
Whatever you choose, make sure you've got, you know, two or three administrators on this.
And in terms of emergencies we've worked with Remind and Raptor in the past.
There are some new products on the scene that we haven't tried out yet.
But those two are pretty well vetted.
And, you know, the, they.
They can sync up with your student information system, either directly or through Clever.
And so you can get those things out and that will help with text and phone alerts, those types of things.
Remind just got bought, but so far they have not destroyed it after being bought by a bigger company.
So that's good news
Becky: Oh, that's good to hear.
And something to remember is don't just choose one method of communication, so not just email.
Make sure you have many ways of communicating with families.
When we had emergencies, you know, could be a big storm, watch, there's a funeral happening, so it's gonna cause traffic congestion.
We always had email, we had in a text blast and we.
Make sure that we don't use the text function so often that people ignore it.
So it's only for emergency situations.
And we also had remind just in case text doesn't work.
So it's like three methods of communicating with families.
And we usually send that simultaneously just in case, you know, someone's more of a email checker or a text, you know, or could be a notification on the phone.
Just make sure that you have many different ways to communicate with your families.
Thomas Boles: Yeah, and consider how those things are getting set up.
You know, may, you may choose one thing because it works really well, and, but you're also gonna hope that, hey, you know, do you have
a connection to our student information system so that we don't have old contacts in there, we're not dealing with bad information.
You want to be able to connect to your system some way.
So that may be one of those things you ask 'em, how can I get my data into yours automatically?
Right?
And so that's, you know, once again, using the student information system or something like Clever to get your stuff into these products.
But also perhaps the student information system has that function, in which case you don't need that particular piece.
Maybe you don't need text, but you need the email function, or you need whatever else.
So I think it's important that when you're evaluating these things, see how it fits into your system so you're not having to update many databases constantly.
And I think that's kind of like the recurring theme of this checklist here is, you know, make sure that you know the right people have access and that the data is being updated properly.
And if there's, you know, points in that chain that are broken, then things are gonna fall apart.
So keep that in mind.
Becky: And speaking of access make sure the people who do have access know how to use these apps, and they're not just waiting for, oh, the principal's not here.
We can't send out the message.
Thomas Boles: and practice your disasters.
You don't wanna be learning on the fly when there's actually something going down at the school.
You know, I think it's we just had the great shakeup or whatever they call it for earthquake preparedness here in San Francisco Bay Area.
But, you know, having a once a year type thing may be good, but it's probably good to do once a quarter and just make sure.
And same way that, you know, the fire department comes by and, you know, you do that drill, you can do all the other drills too and just, you
know, work with your families to kind of work out those kinks and also with your staff to make sure they know how to use all of the things.
And maybe one of those practices is the principle's not available.
So who's gonna be next in, in charge and how do we run that?
So you can try all these things out so that when you are in a tough situation, which God willing, you never will be that you're ready for it.
Becky: So when we did the er emergency preparedness workshops and just like just doing our like emergency bags, we put in a set of directions and how to get uh, sign into remind and definitely cover those passwords.
We do have it.
I think it's on the lanyard, but it was, the password was covered up so that any teacher can take their emergency bag and look at the directions, and it was written out.
I typed everything out.
Here's a website, here's the username and password so that it's not just one point or one person.
It's not just a principal.
It's not the office, it's not the vice principal.
It could be anyone that is designated the lead at the time or the whoever's doing communication.
So, and show or remind teachers, it's all there so that we're not helpless when emergency does happen.
Thomas Boles: Yeah.
And that's like an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of.
Cure, right?
So that annoying task of putting all that stuff together one day, it might take even six hours of sitting there putting that stuff together, but that'll save you when you don't have that time later.
Becky: but on non-emergency situations also do evaluate, like how do you communicate with your parents?
Is it email?
I know we used to use MailChimp and the benefit of having a service like that is that you can track like how many people opened it, open the school newsletter, are you getting information out?
Do you need to do revisions?
But also I know a lot of schools use their SIS Is that your only way?
Is that the best way?
Just get some feedback on it and make sure it is set up.
Mm-hmm.
Thomas Boles: Yeah.
And make sure that you have you know, not only that you've got the system set up, but you know, one little note to quality here is that your, you know, your parent communication, you want it to be consistent.
You know, don't send 55 emails a week randomly.
Like we want to be, you know, sending out our news on a regular basis so parents actually read it.
Because anything if you start sending stuff out irregularly.
Folks will think that, oh something went down.
Right.
But if they're doing that all the time, then they're gonna see like, oh, this is just another whatever email.
So be consistent.
Be, you know, on target there.
But don't forget to also talk about what makes, you know, talk about the mission of the school too.
And this is a nod to John Maha who said, you know, don't forget mission over maintenance.
You know, you want to tell the people there's something going on this Friday and that they should be going to this, and they should bring the slip in for that.
That's all fine and dandy, but you also need to talk about, you know, the goodness of the school and what's going on.
So people, you know, understand that the direction and can, and get to know all the beautiful things that are happening.
You know, if we're only talking about maintenance stuff, at some point people just kind of skim and delete, you know, so be sure that parent communication is consistent and worth reading.
Becky: Oh, right.
And I know like in a previous podcast we were talking about like every time we hear from the school it's asking for money or my kid's in trouble.
So consistent, predictable, and do communicate.
Thomas Boles: And that way when you do send something that's off, they recognize that, oh, this is different.
This is important.
Right?
But if you just send random emails whenever you feel like it, then you know, people will tune out.
So once again stay consistent and you know, don't blow up their inboxes because it's a tri wolf situation.
Becky: Oh, next on our tech checklist is a device update and management.
Everybody loves their devices, but they don't love it when it doesn't work.
What are some things that you recommend in terms of update and management?
Thomas Boles: Well, number one it's good to have an inventory and to know when those things are gonna expire.
And if you don't know when they're gonna expire you can randomly put the eight year expiration date on most
things.
So you know, that's pretty true for networks.
That's pretty true for our Chromebooks and our iPads.
Almost anything would probably need to refresh in that time.
And if you're really smart about it, we'll have a separate podcast about this in the future.
But if you're really smart about it, that you go about setting up the replacement cycle so that things don't break and you're replacing them in cycle and not wasting money.
You know, a lot of schools will spend, you know, a ton of money one summer on like a hundred devices.
And then, you know, in a few years they gotta replace all those devices.
They have to buy another a hundred.
But if you're buying 20 a year.
Instead of 101 shot, then it becomes very feasible.
And your budget, this is the genius part.
Your budget stays consistent.
We have x number of dollars that we spend on the technology stuff every year, and it's all in cycle.
So I would get it inventoried.
I would get it on the schedule, put the expiration date on your inventory, and so you can look at planning out how those things work.
And then, you know, make sure everything gets managed.
I know it's easy to pull things outta the box and then put 'em out and everything works fine and Danny.
But if it's not managed, then you don't really have control over those things and that's where you can get into some trouble.
So, once again, reach out to our IT team if we're doing Chromebooks, Google admin's $38 license one time for the life of the device.
Very reasonable.
'cause you're probably gonna get to eight, 10 years outta that device.
And for iPads you don't, you're gonna get a yearly device fee for a management license.
And I'd recommend Mosul for that, Five 50 per device per year basically works out to like 50 cents a month to manage that device.
It's just nothing.
I know it all adds up, but the idea that you'd have to go around in the old days, we'd have to go around to every device type in like 16 passwords to update things is huge.
And, you know, to be able to tell your tech team, Hey, I need this new app for this upcoming whatever, and that can be pushed out to it immediately, or, you know, within a few minutes.
That's priceless.
Saves time and therefore you got more time for other things.
Becky: Oh, right.
Because we don't, as a tech team, we don't go to the school every single day.
If the kindergarten teacher just needs a simple app, like, oh, can you put this app on my classroom iPads so the kids can work on whatever, how great it would it be to be able to say, okay, give us like 30 minutes and we'll push it out.
As opposed to, you have to wait until next week.
So that software is essentially
Thomas Boles: yeah.
And all the other things like, oh, the iPad's locked.
Okay, well let's unlock that.
know, it went missing.
Where is it?
All these things, you know, the management makes it easier.
So having that in there and having things on that cycle makes a huge difference.
Becky: big question is who's doing all this?
Management?
We need a tech leader.
Who are your tech leaders at your school?
Um, what have you seen Thomas?
Thomas Boles: Well, in a perfect world, we all know in a perfect world, there'd be like 50,000 bodies running everything in the schools.
But you know, we at Catholic schools we're pretty slim in terms of the staff that we have
and you can get by with, you know, having one of the admin handle a lot of the stuff because it's a lot easier than it used to be.
You might need some help setting it up.
But what we love, we would love to see is somebody on site.
That's great.
You know, if you've got a tech coordinator, great, they're managing on site.
If you don't have a tech coordinator, then you can have a fractional CTO, if you will.
That's a fancy name for, can I have somebody who deals with this sometimes.
And that person can be, you know, your tech team and they can manage it using somebody on site who is a tech liaison.
You know, just having somebody who's on site who can reboot something or pull a serial number for whatever.
It's a great way to deal with a lot of these big things without the overhead of having a whole other body inside the building.
We've, you know, that's our entire business is built on the fact that.
Not everybody can afford to have a body in the building, and so therefore, you know, we just need a little bit of expertise to help us get through a lot of these things.
So that would be the ideal situation.
And that tech liaison should not be the principal.
It shouldn't even be the vice principal, although I see that happens a lot.
You know, if you have an aide or a teacher who's a little bit more savvy, who's got a period free here and there, uh, those are the type of people that would be perfect for this.
And they don't necessarily have to be great at stuff.
They just have to be great at you know, following directions, working with somebody else to resolve a problem.
You know, all those things that we love about teachers in general.
Becky: Right,
Thomas Boles: So
it should be somebody who's, you know, willing to walk through those steps because 95% of the stuff can be handled with somebody remote.
But you just need some hands sometimes and some eyes sometimes.
And so we can walk through people if they're patient enough.
Becky: right.
And it could be like a simple trade off as like, oh, you're relieved from one yard duty a week to handle or communicate to the tech team.
Like, Hey, what are some of the problems?
It's just about, you know, someone being available to ask questions and you know, just do the.
Password reset or just like reboot something.
So yeah, it'd be great.
If you don't have a tech coordinator or a tech teacher on site and it's, you know, just could be a classroom teacher, could be an aide.
A good resource is our tech group with our archdiocese.
And we'll leave a link in the notes.
So if you wanna join the SF two KA group, that's a perfect place to ask questions.
It's like, Hey I need to block YouTube.
What's a good way to do it?
You know, just find your resources, find your community.
Thomas Boles: Yeah, and if you're not local, we can help you figure out what group you can join because there's definitely national groups.
There's also, you know, groups probably local to your area that we could help you find so that you have that group to lean on.
It's so important to be able to reach out to other folks and get help.
Another thought though is, you know, if we go back to this idea of having a staff member who can do something, one thing, if you've got the bandwidth for it, and not the internet bandwidth, but
the staff bandwidth you know, our role that's maybe below the student council type situation, but you have a teacher who can run we used to call them mouse squads, but basically a student IT team.
And you wouldn't give them anything sensitive, but they could handle a lot of the stuff and do the information gathering.
'cause a lot of times we'll get a request in and we ask a handful of questions.
You know, what's that device?
What class were they in?
What app were they using?
Those types of things.
The kids can be the eyeballs in the room and collect that data and submit it to the form.
Or even just collect it to handle that teacher.
And that teacher can be the one who, you know, maybe handles the deal or passes on to one, somebody like us.
But having a couple kids in every class, and I usually like to get four in each class.
So you have the two as backups.
No one's ever gonna miss 'cause they're sick.
That you have these kids who are looking out and they're just doing the small stuff and not being, you know, the police or anything,
but, you know, a great way to check the cart is plugged in at the end of the day and that everyone's device will be charged tomorrow.
That's a nice little you know, 32nd task for them to do.
That will save a huge deal.
Is it plugged in?
You know, did we turn this off?
Can we save electricity?
Did we turn off the TV at the end of the day?
Or the projector.
We don't wanna burn out the bulb, so let's get the projector off.
Small little things that they can do and they can do actually a lot.
It is, if you give 'em a little bit of training, you don't have to give 'em access to anything you don't wanna give 'em access to.
But it's a great way to, to build up what you have locally without spending a ton of money and you're not gonna use them so much that you have to worry about child labor laws.
So it's just a great, it's a great leadership task for somebody who may or may not be, you know, suited for president of the school.
But there's a lot of kids who can do really well at this kind of thing, who can be organized, who can gather the data and can help out their fellow students.
And what better way to show, you know, service than to service to each other.
So, you know, think about that.
It's not much to do.
We can help train folks if they don't know how to do this with their students.
But it's a great way to build more responsibility of the students so they're not destroying devices.
Becky: Oh yeah, definitely ownership.
And if you don't have an organized school-wide student tech team what I've done in the past when I used to teach, I used to have like two people as the office monitor, two people as the lunch monitor.
So you have two people in your classroom and could be on a rotating basis where they're the tech for the week.
So there's not always looking at, oh, it's that same kid, you know, just hand.
So everybody has ownership and has the opportunity to learn.
It could be something as simple as like, hey, at the end of the day the two of, you're in charge of plugging in your Chromebooks or plugging in your iPads.
And that way, as you know, the thing that breaks most frequently are the chargers.
Hey, if you're in charge of it, you know, then you'll be more careful or the kids will be more careful and they'll be more mindful of it.
Thomas Boles: Definitely, it solves a lot of those problems.
Most kids don't destroy things, but if there's not a system in a classroom, things get destroyed.
Plain and simple.
Becky: Right.
Speaking of devices, like how do we pay for all this stuff, right?
And you're talking about excellent strategy is to like schedule your purchases in smaller chunks.
'Cause I know you recommended to some of our schools where you're like, oh, hey this year we're gonna order for this class.
Next year we'll order for this class.
So what are some other strategies for funding?
Thomas Boles: Well, there's obviously some of the state things that you have available.
You know, we have in California here we have the CTF, and so you can get some discounts on your.
Subscriptions like your internet services and maybe your phone services devices, you know, the, to get discounts on devices you can plan your purchases at the quarterly ends.
So all vendors will try to make their quotas at the end of the quarter, right?
So what's that?
Like the end of March, the end of June.
The end of September.
And they'll try to get those things in there.
So there's usually a pretty big discount.
So if you buy on those cycles you probably save some money there.
But you also can use groups like TechSoup and E-Rate in certain circumstances where you can get, you know, discounted prices and some things that are paid for.
I think it's also, we talked about this in the fundraising.
If you set.
That budget aside, and you say that this one fundraiser will forever, you know, take care of this one cost, then parents know that and you're not always talking about technology.
And I think that's one of the big you know, problems of forever is we've been buying technology forever and, you know, are we making any progress?
So it's, we wanna make progress, we wanna make sure we got the right technology, and we wanna make sure that the parents realize that money's being well spent.
So if you are gonna do it in a fundraiser moment, make sure it's consistent there too.
But yeah there's a handful of ways.
There's also some ways that you can use you can plug some holes with used devices and save yourself some money.
So, you know, little strategies here and there.
Becky: And I've seen in some more traditional sense of funding devices is that when students get to upper grades like my school had an iPad program for middle schoolers, but the lower grades didn't.
Then the middle schoolers would have a technology fee or a rental fee or of some sort.
So you could do it in that way too, where it's a small portion of the cost of the device, but over three years.
So what I did was, like, an iPad was about $500.
I just divided by three.
So each year they each middle school student paid about 120 $550 to pay over the course of the three years.
So it, it was more manageable for families too.
Thomas Boles: Yeah, and if you spread that, so if you use the technology fee we actually worked this out with one of our schools that between purchasing a new device one set of devices every year.
And, you know, maybe the repair cost or the insurance cost of protecting those devices I guess we worked out it was $78.
For $78 a year.
You could have a new device and have it quote ur, right?
And so that way you know that like you can replace any device that comes that might be broken, you're probably gonna lose about 10% of them.
But that fee, $75 is not a lot, you know, to ask for a family.
And if you throw that into your fees, it becomes very easy to collect that at the beginning of the year.
But even if you broke that down per month, it's so cheap to be able to afford a new set of devices.
But that's because you've made the plan.
You've got it on schedule.
You're not trying to overbuy your budget.
So you have to be really organized about that, but it's so simple and that's something that you could do across the board.
You know, any school can manage even their small number of devices.
If you've got a gazillion kids and you a gazillion devices, it still works that way.
So, you know, reach out to your tech vendor and see how you can make that plan.
But really you want to think about how you're replacing those things and who's paying for it, and that very well could be a student fee.
Becky: Yeah.
And it reminds me of like when we do textbook adoption, you don't adopt all those textbook all in the same year.
You do it over time and you kind of look at like, Hey, when are the licenses due and whatnot.
What are your takeaways?
What are the main things where you're like, really look out for these things, or these are like the top of your priority?
Thomas Boles: I would say that the two things I would push everybody to do, like today as you're listening to this, is one, schedule a meeting or if you can do it today, get on it.
But look at the access.
Do you have access to everything?
Who has access to it?
Get that all written down and figure out how you need to get that.
Get your password manager set up, whatever it might be.
And then number two, think about all the stuff that you have in the building and when can you figure out roughly when it was purchased and so that we can start thinking about what needs to be replaced first.
And I think if you can put those two things together get all your access together and who's on that list, and then all of your devices and when you need to replace them, you are ahead of the game.
So, so far ahead of the game.
And that will just help out with budging and everything else, you know, if you've got those things organized.
So those would be the two things I would say everybody do right now.
And if you can't do right now, schedule the meeting, send off the calendar invite to whoever you need to talk to about it now.
Right now.
Go.
Ready, go.
Becky: Oh, my one thing is, hey, backup.
What's your backup?
I get so many requests trying to save people's data, like what's your plan?
Thomas Boles: Yeah.
Get a plan.
Remember 3, 2, 1, 3 copies, two identical, one in a different place.
Get her done.
we're gonna put this technology checklist in the show notes, and if you need help with any of these things or you want to talk more, please reach out to us.
You can follow the links there.
And most importantly, just consider all these things get on your calendar.
Maybe this is, if you can't get it done now because you're worried about.
Thanksgiving and Christmas at the time of this recording.
You know, this is a great January task to make sure that you're on schedule for the rest of the year and for next year.
So get this stuff out there, reach out if you need help, and we hope that this helps.
Thank you, Becky, for helping me go through that and really for your expertise in putting this all together.
Becky: Oh, thank you.
And if you like this episode, also check out our podcasts on funding.
'cause we have to pay for all this stuff.
Thomas Boles: Exactly.
Check it out and look out for the device management and device cycle podcast that will be coming up in the near future.
Becky: Alrighty.
Thank you.
Thomas Boles: Have a good one.
Becky: You too.
Thomas Boles: Thanks for joining us on In Search of Catholic School Excellence.
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