Issue 78 - Term 4 Week 3

Access for students to participate in online meetings using Google Meet was enabled at the start of Term 4. Alongside MS Teams and Zoom, teachers are now able to use Google Meet with their students. For schools that use Google Classroom, Meet offers a simple way to connect live with your students, while still offering online classroom management controls. If you missed our amazing introductory webinars held last Thursday, you can still catch up with the online recording. It will help you and your staff with making the most from Google Meet, so please share this link with them! A new Google Meet information page on the intranet is also well worth sharing with teachers. It contains downloadable quick reference guides and links to supporting video advice that is suited to both staff and students.

From Monday, 1 November, the department's new enterprise agreement with Adobe will be enabled for all users. K-6 students will no longer be licenced for use of the Creative Cloud suite at home or on their BYODs. Primary school students will still be able to use Creative Cloud applications on school-owned Windows and Mac devices, as long as the new packages have been deployed via UDM. BYO and work-at-home access will continue as normal for all NSW DoE staff and for all 7-12 students. All of the latest Adobe Creative Cloud packages have been added to UDM in the Enterprise Software section. They are ready for deployment to your school's Windows devices. This includes the new and greatly improved 64-bit Adobe Acrobat DC. When deploying the new Adobe packages, any older versions are automatically replaced. 

Term 4 kicked off with a big change for all NSW public school students as we launched their brand new Portal! There are separate portals for years K-2, 3-6 and for High School students. Their portal displays nicely redardless of the device they are using, even if it's a hi-res large screen, an iPad or a smartphone.  And soon, we'll be launching a brand new Staff Portal as well, which will include a feature to easily push extra shortcuts out to each student's Launchpad in their portals. You can even push out a different set of links to each year group! We know that teachers would like to see and understand each of the different student portals, so take a look at the quick video shown below. We also know that your students would like to get familiar with their own portal, so why not share the right one of these three videos with them?
K-2 | 3-6 | 7-12

Did you know that Term 4 marks three years of the stem.T4L project? And what a journey it has been! Over 80% of NSW public schools and thousands of students have used our stem.T4L kits in that time. Our research team looked closely into its impact and effectiveness in schools, with results showing the positive impacts our resources had on teachers and students. It captured significant improvement in teachers' confidence and competence in using STEM technology and improvements in 21st century skills in students, just to name two. We've published the full research report as well as these three quick infographics.

• Long term analysis of stem.T4L
• Outcomes for teachers in stem.T4L
• Outcomes for students in stem.T4L

Hardware Faults - Who do you call? Is something not working at your school? A computer, a network switch, a Main Learning Display, a wireless access point, a printer? In all instances, it's always best to call EDConnect for advice - just phone 1300 32 32 32 or log a ticket online including clear details. 

HP Webcam Privacy cover - Did you know that the newer HP Probooks and Elitebooks all have a privacy cover for their webcams? It's not obvious, but you'll find a slider above the webcam that opens and closes it. Don't forget to open it for your next online meeting!

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Cybermarvels are safe online citizens who share their good practices with others. Pass on this information to all teachers at your school! Find out about Cybermarvel virtual classrooms, webinars and PL available this month to help them and their students stay safe online! Starting today and for the rest of October, we've got some great online events to join into for school leaders, teachers, and parents! And register your class for virtual incursions.  Finally, check out all the fun and engaging activities, game-based learning and videos available in our Cyber play time section.

If your school uses Google Workspace apps and Drive cloud storage regularly, you'll love this new feature that was recently turned on! We've auto-provisioned school-based groups for students and staff into the NSW DoE Google service, to make finding users and groups of users, much easier via the use of Autofill. If you want to share content with people or groups, just choose the share option and start typing. Matching names will automatically appear in Google web and mobile apps. System generated school-based groups have also been included for students (scholastic years and roll classes), teachers and non-teachers in all schools. Just start typing your school code, then the desired year to see the different groups!  So convenient.

With some fantastic work from teams in ITD, we've  completed about 75% of all accounts and will finish migrating most school staff to Exchange Online by the start of Week 4! There will still be some casual staff accounts to complete, but all should be done by mid-November. Want to learn about your new mailbox? We've just announced two one-hour "getting familiar" webinars! Register for the event that best suits - and let your staff know.

• Wednesday 20 October - 7:30-8:30am
• Wednesday 17 November - 7:30-8:30am

And join the Email.Modernisation Project group on Yammer, for the latest information and to ask any burning questions.

At the end of term 2 this year, old Windows 10 v1607 and 1709 devices were disabled and removed from the DoE network. Plans are now in place to disable all remaining v1809 devices from Monday, 1 November. Microsoft ended support for v1809 in May, meaning these devices are now vulnerable and a security risk. Our schools did an amazing job in updating these devices from a high of over 220,000, to less than 7,000 left today. If your school has any older v1809 devices, please arrange to F12-rebuild them in the next two weeks. From 1 November, you will no longer be able to logon to these devices until they are F12-rebuilt to v20H2. Thank you for your support with this important upgrade.

The new Apple MacBook Air 13", MacBook Pro 13" and iMac 24", all with the revolutionary M1 processor, are now available to order through EdBuy! Mac has been a driving force behind the world’s leading engineers, artists, scientists, designers and musicians - and it’s been doing the same for students too! MacBooks are built for the classroom, with all-day battery life, next-level performance and built-in creativity tools. Thanks to the efforts of ITD's DDaC team, Apple M1 Macs are now managed using the department's preferred Apple device management solution, Jamf Pro. Learn more about Apple's Vision for Learning with Mac for some great ideas to get started in your classroom.

Information Technology Directorate publishes three issues of news.T4L each term. Remember - share each issue with your staff! And if you aren't receiving an email notification as soon as a new issue of news.T4L drops, then you're missing out! So why not subscribe?