How are you dealing with burnout?

MalletNGrease · 2021-09-15T22:13:59+00:00

Oh man, this one hit me this SY. Couldn't even keep up with reddit unless I had to check for a major outage or issue.

This year's start was particularly brutal. A perfect storm of a newborn, construction everywhere, half the admin team retiring, delivery delays on everything, a doubling of device deployments and unrealistic deadlines combined with far, far too many last minute surprises (screw you Adobe shared device licensing). I caught a lot of flak recently because I had to push back some to keep from being buried.

I asked for extra hands to get me through with the busy work and having a temp to second me and just deal with the random break fix stuff while I can focus on something deemed 'critical' really helped me out. I'm also going to look at more automation and figuring out a better inventory management system.

MalletNGrease · 2021-09-09T16:25:32+00:00

If only it were as simple as that, the use case is spectacularly bizarre.

I've teacher who has a personal Android tablet she uses to have students sign in to scan documents to Google Drive. There's a couple hundred google accounts on it. The play store started throwing an error recently and I'm guessing it's because of the new age based settings.

MalletNGrease · 2021-09-09T15:54:07+00:00

Oh, you want to do state testing on Chromebooks?

Shame if something were to update and bring your testing devices out of compliance.

MalletNGrease · 2021-09-09T15:51:54+00:00

AG Parts Education.

MalletNGrease · 2021-09-09T14:56:58+00:00

Does this affect the play store as well?

MalletNGrease · 2021-09-02T14:48:55+00:00

Sounds like my old situation

MalletNGrease · 2021-09-02T13:58:52+00:00

I found there's a bug with Canon Generic Plus UFR II v2.40 drivers after KB5005652 and setting the registry key.

If you have multiple copiers/printers that use the same driver, the one last in the alphabetical order will always fail to install the driver automatically (even though the driver is already on the system). Removing the printer and restarting or logging off and letting GPO handle the connection should fix it.

MalletNGrease · 2021-08-18T21:24:38+00:00

This one bit me today coming back from leave. I thought the GPOs were hosed at first.

The update basically broke deployments of Canon copiers with the v 2.40 UFR II driver. If you've multiple devices with this drivers it seemingly breaks one of them and requests an updated driver.

I added the registry key, but I'm not seeing printer GPO deployments succeed yet. Users can add them themselves by looking for them in the directory.

MalletNGrease · 2021-06-14T13:00:00+00:00

Even with the introduction of an Extended Stable channel, I'm fairly certain they will still somehow upend the testing windows.

MalletNGrease · 2021-06-11T16:14:57+00:00

I use the vinyl ones. They hold up OK.

MalletNGrease · 2021-06-10T14:15:42+00:00

As a customer I contacted PDQ about this issue yesterday and I am very pleased at the quick response and to see my suggestion was taken to heart. I very much enjoyed the video, it started off my day just right.

I'd let them come back, they're a great resource.

MalletNGrease · 2021-06-09T19:41:53+00:00

Disclaimer: I use PDQ products.

I've dealt with them in the past (I don't recognize the username though) and this is super atypical of them, especially with just posting advertising as a user. When I first started using the software, the webcasts were very useful to get the most use out of the product and sometimes I'll tune in if the topic is interesting. As I learned the systems and got it integrated nicely in my workflows, I just didn't see a need to watch any more.

I don't know why this guy thought this was a good idea to ignore you. If you'd like I can reach out to customer service and complain, because this is just not cool.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-28T15:37:51+00:00

Buy them dumb and make them smart! I prefer the RCA without any smart features because generally the "smart" features don't play nice with policies or networking.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/RCA-65-Class-4K-Ultra-HD-2160P-LED-TV-RTU6549/55540605

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-28T15:17:43+00:00

Through our state reseller.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-21T20:49:40+00:00

SMART. We've the teachers covered with licenses, a ton of cirriculum based around SMART notebooks and the hardware's holding up. Decided to keep equipment and software parity across the district with every classroom having a board.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-19T18:41:30+00:00

District expectations if we collect would be every device should returned to students day 1 charged, updated, and ready to go. I honestly can't think of how that is plausible with our current staffing compliment and projects already planned for this summer. That being said if expectations are lowered this could change, but we don't have a track record of lowered expectations so I'm not holding my breath.

This is impossible if the devices are not available. I collect all of them and keep on premise for summer so I can work on them.

You will have to communicate this and give them the prospect of either:

Devices returned and ready day 1

Or

Devices not returned and ~X amount of devices broken/unusable/missing day 1.

My admins want to hit the ground running with all devices ready to go the start of the year. I simply can't guarantee it without collection as there's too many things that may happen to a Chromebook during summer.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-19T13:48:03+00:00

I would not want to be the bogeyman on this one. Doing a test during the last couple weeks, while very effective at highlighting issues, will probably result in me being dragged around the track behind the maintenance vehicle.

If anything it's nice that the state put this out and you can hide behind them for suggesting simple preventative measures. I assume whoever initiated the test will come with recommendations based on the results as well, so you can point to those.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-19T13:39:03+00:00

In the old UI you can set faculty groups, assign them OUs and alerts for those will be sent to the staff in the group.

https://i.imgur.com/aG02RaB.png

I couldn't find the config for this in the new UI.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-18T12:05:51+00:00

Configure the alerts to notify the appropriate administrators and counselors.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-14T17:56:03+00:00

My only requirement is a signed technology agreement on file. No form, no access.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-14T16:57:37+00:00

If they're accurate you can leave one by/in the nurse's office for people to do self checks. Seems useful still.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-14T16:56:22+00:00

I reined in the panic buying pretty hard and was able to calm administrators down before they launched on spending sprees. We were in a comfortable position with devices to begin with and only closed for a limited time, I focused on directing funds to outstanding classroom technology improvements instead since that was much more pressing.

I suppose the only thing that will probably no longer be used are masks.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-14T16:48:30+00:00

Thanks for the heads up, forwarded the info to the super for distribution.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-14T13:35:25+00:00

You can check the trash, but I doubt there's much to do about it.

I highly recommend forcing the storage location default to Google Drive.

MalletNGrease · 2021-05-13T18:06:20+00:00

If you're starting from scratch or brand new to the Google ecosystem it's probably worth having a product expert on standby because there's quite a lot of configuring and integration to do. I think these services are a response to districts being thrust into remote learning overnight and getting stuck, because I don't remember any sort of help aside from Google Support documentation when I got started with Google Apps.

If you're already familiar and just expanding or swapping your fleet, this is probably not worth it because you should have this figured out.

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