MAEDS 2024

Workshop for Evaluating AI Applications and Ensuring Organizational Readiness for your Classroom, School, or District.

With the unprecedented surge in AI solutions for education, it’s vital to consider factors to ensure that this new technology aligns with educational goals and benefits both students and educators and also incorporates the required guardrails for safety, ethics, and long-term sustainability.

Our Education Strategy Team will provide a 4-hour workshop to guide participants through Data Privacy and Security, Model Performance and Accuracy, Bias and Fairness, Interpretability and Explainability, Scalability and Sustainability as well as Interoperability and Training for implementing AI in a district. We will provide guidance on how can schools and districts be thoughtful and prepared for AI adoption and use.

This session will be workshop format and provide valuable materials for districts to use with teams back in their schools and districts.

This session will also feature
Aaron Baughman | Assistant Superintendent of Instruction at Northville Public Schools & AI Enthusiast
Joel Lathrop | Education Strategy Director (AI, Security, Data and Analytics) at PowerSchool

Synopsis: When NetApp announced the EOL for our Solidfire clusters in mid-2021, we faced a critical choice. The cost of replacing our SAN with new scale-out solutions was prohibitive, exacerbated by COVID supply chain issues and slow Cisco support. We needed a new approach to our datacenter strategy.

After exploring various scale-out HCI options, narrowing our focus on hypervisors that support VSAN and with the VMware acquisition by Broadcom announced in 2022, it only reaffirmed our need for a fresh start. That was when we were introduced to Verge.io.

In this session, we'll delve into the capabilities of VergeOS and discuss how it has reshaped our entire datacenter approach. We’ll feature a technical discussion with Verge.io’s SVP of Engineering, offering insights into the solution’s innovative virtualized datacenter infrastructure design which made our dream of datacenter 2.0 a reality.

Join us for an insightful session on "Ensuring Excellence: Michigan DataHub's Data Verification Tools." In this session, you'll discover the critical role data quality plays in the success of data integrations and legislative reporting. We will showcase MiDataHub’s robust data quality tools through a live demonstration, highlighting key features such as the Benchmark Assessment feature, the At a Glance Report, and Custom Exports. Learn how these tools are designed to ensure your data integrations are accurate and reliable, empowering you to achieve seamless and successful data management across your systems. Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your data quality practices with Michigan DataHub!

Keeping up with constant changes to the Google Admin console is challenging. This workshop is your shortcut to success! Get a rapid fire summary of the latest Google admin updates for Classroom, Meet, Drive, Chromebooks, and more. These new features and options will help you manage your users, services, and devices and improve learning in your district.

In this session we will be focused on content that can help those folks who are just starting their careers or who have switched their careers over to K12 educational technology support. Come discover all the things you didn't know you needed to know ... We'll talk about various services and platforms that you will want to become comfortable with. We will go over resources that you should keep handy as you settle into your role supporting K12 educators and learners. We'll share real-world examples of the 'fun ones' we've had over the years so that those situations don't catch you off guard.

In an era of increasing cybersecurity threats, educational institutions must be prepared to respond effectively to incidents that could disrupt learning, compromise sensitive data, or damage reputations. This professional development session will introduce participants to the three Incident Response templates crafted by the members of the Cybersecurity TaskForce over the last year.

These templates have been developed to address the unique challenges faced by public school districts. The templates range from a Single Page (Crawl), Multi-Page (Walk), and In-Depth (Run) that are freely available on the MiSecure website.

Participants will leave with copies of the documents tailored to their organization.

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, moving file storage to the cloud is not just a trend—it's a necessity. This session brings together professionals with deep experience in both Google Cloud and Microsoft OneDrive to guide you through the pros and cons of migrating your organization's file storage to either platform. The discussion will provide an in-depth comparison of these leading options, covering key aspects such as security, scalability, and ease of integration. Whether you're considering a shift to the cloud or looking to optimize your current setup, this session will equip you with the insights needed to make an informed decision tailored to your organization's needs.

Description:
Ready to geek out and empathize a little while solving big IT problems? This session will present key findings from our feasibility studies on consolidating and expanding shared IT services across Michigan's K-12 landscape to achieve more equitable services. We explored the potential for intermediate school districts (ISDs) to offer centralized services like Service Desk, network engineering, administration, Cloud storage, and more on a regional or statewide basis. Spoiler alert: we’re all about finding solutions that promote digital equity and make IT staff smile (yes, really!).

The studies analyzed current IT services, projected costs, implementation roadmaps, and benefits of a consolidated model. Our guiding principles? Ensuring equitable access, enhancing network reliability and security, leveraging shared services, and—you guessed it—improving staff retention rates and tackling the things that keep you up at night. Who doesn’t want to give their overworked staff a real vacation without having to log in?

We'll share real-world staffing and operational data from multiple ISDs, giving you the inside scoop. The session will cover our "working backwards" approach, starting with a vision for an equitable future state that provides engaging IT career paths, and then offering some nitty-gritty details of possible approaches to implementation.

Attendees will gain insights into:
-Potential for centralized services to provide enriching professional development opportunities (Ever thought about career coaching for IT ninjas?)
-Roadmap for phased implementation prioritizing underserved areas and staff wellbeing (Because who doesn’t love a good roadmap?)
-Identifying the indicators that help you recognize when the timing is right for collaboration efforts and start planning for increased stability (We all need indicators, even if we don’t all use our turn signals)
-Challenges faced and solutions for improving IT staff job satisfaction (Let’s face it, happy IT folks = happy schools)
-Opportunities for skills diversification and reduced burnout in a shared services model (Because variety is the spice of IT life)

Whether your district currently offers shared services or is simply interested in improving IT workforce retention, this session provides valuable data-backed insights. Come learn about collaborating across districts to create rewarding technology roles that attract and retain top talent for the benefit of all our schools and students.

Plus, we promise at least one bad tech joke. (Why do programmers prefer dark mode? Because light attracts bugs!)

See you there!

Get practical advice, tips, and tools for developing a successful Chromebook program at your school. Whether you are just getting started with Chromebooks, or are already managing thousands of them, you will learn essential tools, practices, and strategies for deploying, managing, monitoring, and protecting your devices. These tips will save you time and money and help ensure your devices are optimized for learning.

An overview of numerous tools (Ping Castle, Script Sentry, and more) and PowerShell strategies to secure your Active Directory and Windows Server environment(s). Approaching security from an assumed breach point of view, and utilizing the ACT Cycle to assess, configure, and test (pentest).

AV systems continue to evolve and call to ride on your production networks. What do you need to know as a technology director, network engineer, and technician about these systems and what practical steps do you need to take to prepare your networks to support these technologies? You'll learn this and how to take an IT-centric view of the AV industry.

You're strongly considering moving to the cloud… but what are you getting? Is the cloud more than just "someone else's datacenter?" Is it more than just VMs? Oh yeah it is! Let's talk about all of the other things you get from the cloud - from management and monitoring to security to managed services. KRESA uses over 50 AWS services so we'll cover some of the things we're using and how we're using them to do things at scale we couldn't do in our datacenter.

In this roundtable, we’ll explore the promises and challenges of seamless integration with PowerSchool. How do you successfully get your data to your vendors? What works well, and what doesn’t? We’ll share the integrations we’ve implemented and walk through the setup process. Bring your questions about your own integrations, and together, let’s find the best way to get your data from Point A to Point B—and maybe even back again.

Building on the discussions from the Spring PD session, this follow-up session delves deeper into the costs of VMware and the implications for your organization. We will analyze the recent developments, explore what these changes mean for your organization, and provide insights on how to mitigate the impact. The session will also cover multiple alternatives to VMware, helping you make informed decisions that align with your organization’s needs and budget. Whether you're considering transitioning to new platforms or optimizing your current infrastructure, this session offers practical solutions for everyone.

Physical Security & Technology form a united front to create a Secure Learning Environment