As those of you who follow me on Facebook may have seen, I was at a conference early this week in Coralville, Iowa. ITEC stands for Iowa Technology & Education Connection. This conference was about technology as it pertains to education in Iowa schools. Right up my alley!
The conference officially started Monday morning, but they had a few workshops you could sign up for starting on Sunday afternoon. One of these was a 5 hour workshop on deploying Apple computers with DeployStudio and InstaDMG. I have been using DeployStudio since I started here, but I’m really kind of winging the whole thing. I was hoping to learn a bit more at this panel to make the process a little smoother.
There were about a dozen or so of us at the panel, and a lot of us were plagued by technical issues. Granted what they were having us do was pretty high level stuff, like setting up an Apple server, but it was kind of disappointing. However, I did get a lot of good information and some great documentation on the process. I learned enough about how the product is supposed to work that I can play with it on my own and figure it out.
On Monday morning the conference officially began. The first session I went to was titled “How Healthy Is Your Network?”. I was hoping to get some info on software that I could use to monitor network services. That is just what I got! The session was taught by Scott Fosseen from AEA 8. He is responsible for monitoring the networks of many school districts in his area. The main program he showed us was one called InterMapper. This software will scan your network and find attached devices, and then create a network map for you. It will also monitor your devices and can send you alerts. This program looked great, but it is not free. I work in a school district so budget is always a concern. He did talk about another one though called The Dude. Yeah, its the most horrible name for a software package ever, but it does do a lot of what InterMapper can, but it is free. I’m going to try it out first and see how it goes. If I don’t like it then I’ll be checking out InterMapper for sure.
After the healthy network panel, I went to two more panels also taught by Mr. Fosseen. They were a network design session and a wireless networks session. Both of them were really good too. The network design one was a lot of stuff that I knew already, but it got me thinking about how we are set up now. There are some things I’d like to do differently regarding VLANs and how network traffic is routed. I think the equipment we have already has the capability, but it will just take some effort and planning to implement. As for the wireless session, I learned a lot there. Our wireless situation in our K-8 building is horrible, and I learned a few things here that I can take back and use. I never really understood what the different channels meant in regards to a wireless network. I do now, and I have a feeling that is why our coverage and reliability are so poor. Also, Mr. Fosseen spoke about an awesome managed wireless solution that is made by Xirrus. They are awesome! Maybe someday!
The last session of the day was about keeping PCs clean of clutter and spyware/viruses. He put on a good presentation, but I didn’t really learn anything I didn’t know already. I actually felt that with my experience I could have taught the panel myself!
Tuesday was a shorter day, but I attended a couple of sessions where I was able to learn a few things. First for the day was a session called “Protect Your Workstation”. I got some great ideas here. There are a few products out there that allow a computer to be logged in by anyone, and then when logged out all changes are discarded. So, by the end of the school year a lab computer can still be running as well as it did on day one. If there is a problem, just reboot and it will be back to normal. There is a free one from Microsoft called Windows SteadyState. He also talked about two commercial products called Clean Slate and Deep Freeze. This is certainly something I’m going to implement on our student machines.
My second session on Tuesday was generic and about upcoming technology. Here I learned about a conference that goes on every year in Las Vegas called Interop. Yeah, I wanna go. The last session was about running Apple computers in a Windows environment. There wasn’t a whole lot said here that I didn’t know already, but I did have a few questions that I had answered. It looks like what I have been doing so far is right! There are a few more things that I could do if I was running OpenDirectory on a Mac server, but that is something for another time.
All in all it was a good conference. I brought home lots of good information, and I got out of it everything I hoped I would. There were a couple sessions I missed because they were at the same time as others, but I got to see just about everything I wanted to. Hopefully I’ll be able to go back next year! |
