About Me

My name is Mariah Sexton, and I currently live in Fairbanks, AK.  Right now I'm working as IT System Support for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, and planning my migration to the Portland, OR metropolitan area.  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.

The marvelous Michelle Peterson wrote nice things about me once or twice, which you can check out here.

Reach me on LinkedIn or Twitter


Popular posts from this blog

I taught myself a thing today

My job was created as a response to communication issues between two different school district departments.  Basically, the curriculum department and the tech department needed a translator and someone to manage the systems that were solely the responsibility of the curriculum people (read: programs that were purchased to be integrated without understanding the work load or taking into account the capacity of the tech department). I love my job.  I declared myself neutral territory and put up my own "flag" in my office.  I also get to learn about all the things.  Today, I learned about cron jobs. Automated jobs and/or scheduled tasks are not an unfamiliar concept for me.  However, Linux is not something I've spent a lot of time with.  I do have administrator access to the server where we house all that automation, but "break everything" wasn't on my to-do list for today.  Instead, I installed an Ubuntu 18.04.01 virtual machine to poke at.  Then I dug out
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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 Service Level Agreements, and
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