Feb 21st Google Day

On Feb 21st, our 7-12 professional development day was focused primarily on Google Apps.   It was a conference style schedule with leveled courses that allowed teachers to select the exact sessions to make their own personalized schedule.

Documentation and notes from the Google Training are posted at: http://tinyurl.com/wdmcsgoogle

At the end of the day, we collected feedback from the staff.  Here’s the overall summary, as well a link to the full list of feedback from staff.

What we liked about the PD day. What went well…………….

• Having choice!
• I was able to pick the sessions that were best for me!
• Well organized
• We had hands on time in each session.

 

Suggestions for the future PD….

• Better clarification is needed on the course titles, for example, can move back to labeling them as Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced?
• Do this again!
• Keep doing this – do this EVERY year!
• more work time sessions, where we can apply what we’ve learned
• Have another day just like this one next fall.

 

 

 

Under attack…

As of 9am this morning, all of our district web sites and online services are unavailable to parents and community members, here’s why…

For the last three days, our district has been under a continuous DOS, or Denial of Service, attack.    We’ve been working with our multiple internet providers to remedy the problem, however, as of this morning one of our carriers has dropped our connection because the increase in traffic was more than our system could handle.

Here’s specifically how this has impacted us today, March 3rd, 2014…

1) All of our district websites/services (web site, Infinite Campus, payschools, revtrak) are not available.

2) Emails sent to @wdmcs.org are not reaching us today – and will likely bounce back to you.

Q1.  What is the source of this problem, is someone trying to hack into the school system?
A1.  The true source has not been identified yet, as the source is continuously changing.  It does not appear that they are trying to hack into our network, but instead trying to overwhelm our internet connections, which they are successfully doing.

Q2. How long is this outage going to be?
A2.  Sorry, we do not know…  we are working with our internet providers to remedy the problem and identify the source(s).