About Me

My name is Mariah Sexton.  I read a lot, some people might say too much (though I am not sure I agree that is actually possible.)  I'm a firm believer that there is no such thing as too much coffee.

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Popular posts from this blog

No, You Don't Need That Highlighter App (A discourse on Google for Education and FERPA)

As educators, parents and students around the world struggle to rapidly adapt to our changed environment, now seems like a good time for a reminder that it's ok (even necessary) to slow down and evaluate our technology adoptions.  As such, I'm taking this opportunity to review some points about Google Apps for Education (GAFE) and FERPA compliance. The G Suite Terms of Service for Education Agreement is not a terribly long document, it totals out at just over 12 pages.  When a school district signs up to use Google Apps for Education, someone authorizes this agreement.  In it, Google asserts that they will act as a "school official" with regards to the data they receive.  There are two very important things to remember about this agreement however: This agreement applies to Google's Core Services and does NOT apply to additional services (explicitly noted in the GAFE privacy policy .) It is still the responsibility of the district to configure the G Suite ...
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Synthetics monitoring with New Relic for PowerSchool products

Beginning August 2018, the school district I work for rolled out a new Learning Management System, PowerSchool Learning, for use by faculty, staff and students.   While our primary Student Information System (PowerSchool SIS) is housed on-premises, the learning management module is hosted by the vendor.   One of the concerns brought to my attention prior to the rollout was monitoring i.e. what kind of notice were we to expect during outages, and how could we most effectively communicate that to all effected parties.   So, to start with we needed an effective way to verify that a client could log in to the self-hosted SIS, then navigate through to the offsite-hosted LMS.   While there are many monitoring products out there, and many are very good at what they do, we eventually settled on using New Relic Synthetic Monitoring.   The primary considerations for that were as follows; the scripted browsers are easily configurable, the built-in tracking for Servic...
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Software Request Review Considerations in a K-12 Environment

In a previous post , I discussed the need to slow down and breathe during tech adoption, especially while under stress.  Based on that post, I thought I would share some policies written in regards to software adoption in an educational environment. Several years ago, I was responsible for authoring my employer's Software Steering Review Committee policies and considerations for approval. In a time when the school district I work for was pushing hard on instituting personalized learning, it was difficult to maintain a balance between flexibility and appropriate review. The district already had the initial request process documented, so I was simply left with the review process documentation. Originally, there was a Software Steering Review Committee that met to evaluate requests. Unfortunately, that process was cumbersome and difficult to schedule, which resulted in many successful attempts to completely bypass review. (Please keep in mind, the purpose of this post is not to...
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