Vermont Fest 2024

Join this interactive roundtable discussion to explore how school districts can align their K-12 technology plans with broader district Strategic Planning Goals and a Portrait of Graduate work. Participants will engage in conversations around critical topics, including the role of facilities, funding, tech infrastructure technology instruction, staffing considerations for adequate tech support, and the development of meaningful, ongoing professional development for teachers. This roundtable fosters collaborative sharing of challenges and best practices, encouraging participants to exchange ideas on ensuring technology initiatives enhance learning, align with district priorities, are future-proof, and provide equitable access for all students.

An information secession on the Technoloy and AI available today for protection of your facility and the people in it. This is not a product demonstration it an info secession with Live and recorded demonstration of how to leverage AI to improve your current security solution, how to design an effective solution, how to get the support you need. Major topics: weapon and threat detection, allow or deny authorized access, real-time alerts, reduce false alarms, improved situational awareness, forensic research via simple words, automatic emergency response, predictive security, and customer behavior analysis.

Please join our panel discussion that will be hosted by Alex Webster at SPC. Panel Members will be Peter Drescher (EWSD), Tina Scheindel (OSSD) and Nate Gingras (HUUSD).
How do you deal with Personally Identifiable Information? How do you deal with confidential data on devices that leave the district? How do you manage your inventory of copiers and printers? How does print management software help make the district staff more efficient and save money?

These questions and more will be discussed by our panelists.

Josh, Chris, and Mark have real conversations, real arguments, and real banter on IT issues and trends in K12 Schools. In this session, the guys will discuss AI and other hot items in K12 and how tech depts should prepare.

The Vermont Agency of Education would like to have a Ed-Fi Question and Answer session where we can discuss the current Ed-Fi deployment for state reporting. We also wish to review our data governance plans and other areas where we would like to use Ed-Fi to help the state collect and use data in meaningful ways.

This round table will engage with Tech Directors, Network Administrators, and other district personnel on the technical “side of the house” about ensuring back-up strategies, building in best practice cybersecurity methods, and equipment, and considering how a consortia model might serve needs of many of the smaller districts struggling with these issues. This session is seeking a robust conversation on what needs there are in this realm and what a model might look like that could leverage the back-end, back-up, infrastructure to ensure some cyber safe and redundant systems. Come and bring your ideas and needs to this round table discussion.

Protecting your user and student data from cyber threats. How Ransomware has evolved to crimewave, ransom and extortion. A discussion on the "Dark Web" and who's behind the "bad actor" activity. What's in your incident response plan?Achieving a higher level of security posture through prevention and monitoring with enterprise grade solutions on a K12 Budget.

Building an esports facility can seem like a daunting task. There are lots of questions and unknowns that new programs need to figure out in order to set their teams up for success. In this session, Gravity Gaming by ByteSpeed’s Brycen will run through the important steps in selecting a space in your school, what equipment you will need, and other considerations that go beyond just playing games; like what to look for in streaming accessories, how other schools have set up network and permissions for their machines, and how to fund purchases of the equipment they might need.

Join us to explore how Essex Westford (Peter Drescher), Harwood Unified Union (Nate Gingras) , and Mount Mansfield Unified Union (Jeff Wallis), are leveraging ClassLink in their districts.
-Challenges they faced before using ClassLink
-From SSO to Rostering and Account Provisioning
-Implementation process
-See what’s new
While this is focused on a particular solution, all will talk about various ways all have explored this topic over the years. Consider how this solution might provide a streamlined means to roster and on/offboard employees.

This session will look at how AI is starting to impact your network from a management and security perspective. We will look at what tools are available today and what we should expect in the future and how you can prepare. Part of the session will be dedicated to a round table forum to hear from the group regarding what schools are doing today and how you would like to leverage AI to improve how you are able to protect and manage your network.

While policy and guidelines are only one part of a district's response to the advent of genAI, they are a critical foundation for your district’s approach. A well-crafted policy and resources to guide classroom practice help teachers and students navigate the shifting landscape of technology that surrounds us. In this hands-on session, we will explore the free AI Policy Starter Kit as a starting point for districts and schools to craft thoughtful and proactive generative AI guidance and policy aligned with their district needs and priorities. We will explore resources in the kit that spark conversations about the range of factors and conditions that go into creating genAI policy, and concrete steps that lead to draft policy and guidance language. Using case studies to guide our thinking, we will create a thoughtful and custom approach to district policy and resources that help our teachers and students feel confident in their ability to navigate complexity with a critical lens.

Link to my slidedeck for this session is here.

Apple’s foray into enterprise device management has been a series of incremental changes that has resulted in current best practices standing in conflict with traditional fleet deployment. Fortunately, Apple has also introduced new tools to deal with these legacy challenges so that now is the prime time to prepare for the future of Apple devices using your organization’s Apple School Manager instance.

In this session, we will set the stage by surveying the history of Apple device deployment in education environments, one which was characterized by user-created Apple IDs that were barely a step away from personal ownership. We will then focus on the two primary challenges this has produced, namely, devices being rendered unusable by Activation Lock when transferring users and the existence of user identities that appear to be organization-based but exist without oversight. We will then do a deep dive in understanding the cause of these issues and establish clear processes for avoiding and ameliorating these situations using tools made available by Apple, including the newly announced process for directly converting Personal Apple Accounts to Managed Apple Accounts.

As school leaders continue to navigate the Professional Development (PD) landscape, join WeVideo for an interactive session that examines innovative ideas on balancing asynchronous, synchronous, and personalized PD with faculty, staff, and administrators. We will uncover how Interactive Learning tools can help create a culture of proactive and immediate learning without compromising individual faculty and staff experience and training needs.