K12Advantage.com Collaboration in K12 Education

K-12 Information Technology
Read Me First!

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 08-17-2010 05:37 PM

Welcome to K12Advantage.com. This niche forum came into existence in December 2008 and has continued to evolve since then. The goal was to create a set of forums to help bring together K-12 professionals from all over to exchange ideas.

K12Advantage.com was created to address some fundamental problems in today's social networking sites. Let it be said that Facebook and Twitter are revolutionary, but these types of sites are not well suited to long term organization and archival of information. K12Advantage hopes to blend the best of both worlds, facilitating meaningful current discussions, while at the same time keeping the discussions organized for long term reference.

K12Advantage.com is built by K12 people, for K12 people. Please join in and help us make it the best K12 site on the net!

You are currently viewing the CMS area. Be sure to check out the forums (with an extensive hierarchy) as well. For full instructions describing how to use K12Advantage.com click here or visit the documentation section.
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Enterprise Video Conferencing with your iPad / Android Tablet

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 01-31-2012 06:43 PM

It's no secret that iPad and Android tablets are having a huge impact on education. The mobility, versatility and (in some cases) very reasonable cost of these devices make them invaluable to any school division.

Video communication technologies such as Skype, Facetime etc... most certainly prove to be useful in the k-12 arena, but did you know you can fully integrate your iPad / Android tablet into your school division's existing video conferencing infrastructure? That's right, you can indeed! Polycom makes a great ...

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Inexpensive Sub $100 Android 4.0 Tablets

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 01-29-2012 04:51 PM

The tablet market has been in existence for barely two years now but is proving to be one of the most dynamic, fast pace markets in the technology realm. Much has changed since Apple's initial introduction of the iPad in April 2010. Google's open Android operating system continues to drive fierce competition among ...

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Content Filtering Philosophies

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 09-11-2011 06:43 PM

Content Filtering has become a fairly common practice in K-12 education. There are a variety of filtering devices to choose from, some better than others, but I'll save that for another discussion .

There are a variety of content ...

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Inexpensive, Innovative School Device Cabling Solutions That Meet Fire Code

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 08-31-2011 06:05 PM

I've been working K12 technology for over a decade now and have had the joy (and pain) of going through renovation of existing school buildings as well as construction of new ones.

One topic I've recently experience some growing pains with has been device cabling, specifically projector cabling. We recently renovated one of our ...

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Better Network Login / Logon Scripts

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 08-17-2011 11:53 PM

Today I want to talk about something we may not think of very often, that being login / logon scripts. They aren't something we deal with often once they're done, but when they're broken they have the potential to impact your entire user base. In this article I'll talk about my own methodology for developing safer logon scripts. I'm not sure if there's a proper name for them, but I call them hierarchical logon scripts. The idea of developing a master script which in turn calls multiple child or subscripts.
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CRTC Opens Usage Based Billing of Residential Wholesale Internet to Public Comment

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 02-10-2011 06:24 PM

Well, the CRTC has decided to open the issue of usage based billing of residential wholesale internet to public comment. Not surprisingly it took me a few minutes to figure out the sequence to navigate to find the proper forms to fill out and submit. To help others who may have a difficult time finding these forms, I'll create some instructions with screenshots of what you should be seeing.

Here's a very interesting article which talks about the potential motives behind the whole usage based billing issue:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1899506/
...

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WPA2 Security Hole 196 threat to K-12 Wi-Fi Networks

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 08-17-2010 05:13 PM

Well, summer is winding down and like most K-12 I.T. departments, we're working fast and furious to make sure everything's working well for school start-up.
Any diligent K-12 I.T. manager is always concerned about security not only because we're dealing with student information, but because in reality students are curious and will actively look for any exploit in your network. So we must always go that extra mile to make sure we're not soft on the inside of our network either.

Needless to say I cringed when I recently found out about WPA2 security hole 196. I won't go into detail here about how the attack works, but I will provide the following link which describes the exploit in detail. http://www.airtightnetworks.com/WPA2-Hole196

Read my full forum post here: http://www.k12advantage.com/forums/s...Wi-Fi-Networks and post any comments you may have.
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The Truth About Wi-Fi Arrays

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 05-23-2010 06:11 AM

There's a buzz going on in the Wi-Fi world regarding a new device called a "Wi-Fi Array". For those of you who are not familiar with Wi-Fi arrays, they are basically multiple access points with directional antennas packaged in a single case. The main manufacturer of these devices is Xirrus. You can see their product information here. For those of you who don't know me, I've worked in the I.T. industry for over 15 years now and like most of you K-12 I.T. people, I have to wear a lot of hats. I've worked with Wi-Fi both at a LAN and WAN level for many years and have what I consider to be a fairly good understanding of Wi-Fi technology in general.
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Photocopier Data Security Risk

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 05-11-2010 06:53 PM

As most of you are probably aware, CBS Evening news ran a story about photocopiers and risks associated with data left on the copiers hard drive. It's a very interesting (and disturbing) story.

Here's the YouTube ...

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GnuGK Open Source VOIP/VC Gatekeeper

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 04-25-2010 03:24 PM

It's no secret school divisions have limited funding and with the economy the way it is, times are only getting tougher for public institutions such as education. With these difficult economic times comes the need to explore greater cost saving measures.
...

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Free Encrypted H.323 / SIP Softphones

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Ernest Aleixandre

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Published on 04-23-2010 06:20 PM

I wanted talk briefly about two interesting pieces of technology I found some time ago. As most of you know, one of the downfalls for H.323 has always been it's inability to deal with NAT (Network Address Translation). If don't have a H.323 gatekeeper, ...

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IT_Recent_Forum_Posts

Anyone else out there having major issues with Aruba firmware 6.1.x?

6.1.3.1 was causing controller lockup issues for us and 6.1.2.8 has

Aruba 3200 Firmware 6.1.x Issues
Ernest Aleixandre 04-02-2012, 05:06 PM

Word is currently spreading around the net that hundreds of Wordpress sites running version 3.2.1 have been compromised using an (as of yet) unknown vulnerability.

Hundreds of Wordpress 3.2.1 sites hacked
Ernest Aleixandre 02-01-2012, 06:39 PM

I think that - if it's not to late - Microsoft will dominate the market once more with this update. They pulled a lot resources off of other projects

It may be to late?
damon 01-25-2012, 06:09 PM

We upgraded to Powerschool 7 this August and have had some issues with what appears to be the services restarting or halting logging due to excessive

Powerschool Known Issue 64235 (Services Intermittently Restart) Possible Fix?
Ernest Aleixandre 10-11-2011, 05:49 PM

Here's a sample information security policy template provided to us by our friends in Alberta Education. Whether you're plan is to create a policy from

Sample Information Security Policy Template
Ernest Aleixandre 10-03-2011, 05:41 PM

This is a backup solution we developed and have been using for almost 8 years now. I realize there are newer solutions on the market which we may consider

Simple Effective Backups using Robocopy
Ernest Aleixandre 09-28-2011, 05:07 PM

Here's an interesting article a colleague of mine shared with me this morning. While the iPad is leading the "consumerization" charge, I think

How the iPad will change I.T. forever
Ernest Aleixandre 09-21-2011, 03:25 PM

Today, at Microsoft's build conference, the software giant is scheduled to release a preview of Windows 8. Windows 8 is the first significant change to

Microsoft Launches Windows 8 Preview
Ernest Aleixandre 09-13-2011, 08:27 PM

In follow up to this message which is now over 1.5 years old, I forgot to mention why the difference in aspect ratio from desktop monitor to projector/Smartboard

Market moving to 16:9 ratio displays? Trouble for Smartboards?
Ernest Aleixandre 09-13-2011, 04:23 AM

In response to the concerns raised by the parent in our division, I was asked by our Board to look into the issue of wireless radiation. I created a

Thanks Ernest
acmcdonaldgp 09-13-2011, 02:12 AM

Wow!! Great set of bookmarks acmcdonaldgp! I just read the reuters article and it really puts things in perspective. I think the WHO IARC report show

World Health Organization IARC Adds Fuel to the Wi-FiRE
Ernest Aleixandre 09-13-2011, 01:19 AM

Hey Ernest, I hope all is well.

This is a timely thread. The WHO announcements really got a lot of press from the groups who support removing

World Health Organization IARC Adds Fuel to the Wi-FiRE
acmcdonaldgp 09-13-2011, 12:45 AM

Just when we all thought the debate over the health risks of Wi-Fi was dead and burried, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research

World Health Organization IARC Adds Fuel to the Wi-FiRE
Ernest Aleixandre 09-12-2011, 10:33 PM

Content Filtering has become a fairly common practice in K-12 education. There are a variety of filtering devices to choose from, some better than others,

Content Filtering Philosophies
Ernest Aleixandre 09-11-2011, 06:43 PM

While searching the Internet for best practices for security, I stumbled across a fairly comprehensive set of security documents I just had to share with

Australia's Comprehensive 35 Security Recommendations
Ernest Aleixandre 09-06-2011, 04:09 PM

I just had to make a forum post about this problem. This one had us scratching our heads a bit. We had a cluster of brand new systems in a computer lab

SCCM and duplicate UUID SMBIOS GUIDs
Ernest Aleixandre 08-29-2011, 09:27 PM

Hi everyone, in follow up to my post about enabling malicious page blocking in Sophos, those of you using Internet Explorer 7, 8 and 9 may want to consider

Enabling IE8 / IE9 Smartscreen Filter and IE7 Phishing Filter via GPO
Ernest Aleixandre 05-09-2011, 05:04 PM

One of the nice features of Sophos Anti-Virus is that the newer versions include the ability to block malicious web pages when enabled.

Malware

Enabling Sophos malicious web page blocking
Ernest Aleixandre 05-06-2011, 08:40 PM

Wow... I don't know how I missed this post... First of all, I'd like to apologize for my tardiness in responding... If I drop the ball again, feel free

The Perfect School Network
Ernest Aleixandre 02-20-2011, 02:07 AM

One thing we've found to be quite successful is connecting computers to the existing soundfield systems in classrooms. We have a fairly large infrastructure

Need Speaker Recommendations
Edutech 02-07-2011, 07:36 PM

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