Start of Year E-Learning Updates

1. Internet access at Cashmere high School
Half way through 2015, CHS moved its internet filtering system in house and purchased a product called Fortigate. The value of this system not only lies in its robust filtering of sites that need to be blocked but also in the reports that it is able to generate.

Our IT management company work with the school on this, and currently the HoS and Associate Principal receive a weekly report that shows the top student ‘download’ users in each level and the top websites that are being visited by our students. The other area of information to be generated is around students who are trying to browse school ‘denied’ websites. This information is to enable us to make better informed decisions about website use going forward.

If students are trying to see ‘denied’ sites, a ticket will automatically be generated to the IT management company and the HOS will be informed so a timely conversation can be had with the student concerned.

Some sites are blocked for students.  If you want to show something from a blocked sited, i.e. Netflix, all you need to do is put in a ticket to our IT people 24 hours before you need access and they can unblock the website for a lesson.

The same can be said for reverse blocking, if you want your students to sit a test on Education Perfect for example, but not have the students browse other sites to find the answer, you can put in a ticket to block all access except for the site you want to use, giving you better control in test situations.

And finally, if you do see a student on a site that is inappropriate, or a gaming site during class but they deny it, again put in a ticket with regards to who the student is, and we can find the information via the fortianalyser.

2. Operating system and school protocols
The Ministry of Education provides all schools with Microsoft 365 for free.  However, the majority of our staff use the google education suite, (i.e. google classroom, google sites, drive, slides).

In google drive all staff members should have access to a relevant faculty drive in shared drives.  Any files within those faculty folders are owned by the school which alleviates any issues of personal ownership caused by staff movement.  There is also a school-wide admin folder in the shared drives which contains information around school-wide activities or processes.  ​​​​​​​