Edutech

The trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a k-12 school network analyst

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Chris Sluggett leads the talented and highly commended Technology Services team at Wolf Creek Public Schools, a school district covering rural communities north of Red Deer. The breadth of responsibility for his team — from enabling online learning, to protecting student privacy, to keeping the lights on — can be overwhelming to outsiders. But it […]

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Teaching students data literacy through everyday curricula

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The free, interactive platform that has helped over 88,000 students across Canada learn and apply data science skills through their everyday curricula has been renewed for a further two years. With the new funding from the national CanCode program, the Callysto platform will continue its focus on developing responsible digital citizens, while increasing outreach to

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Alberta’s public shared procurement program surpasses $30M in savings as more security offerings added

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Alberta’s ShareIT public procurement program has passed the spend milestone of $50 million since it was implemented in 2017. This equates to a total estimated savings for its members of +$30 million (over their average education discount rate). This milestone comes as the program adds a variety of new firewall hardware, licensing, and services to

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Cost savings and new training initiatives: the latest from ShareIT

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Alberta’s ShareIT public procurement program has reported its most productive quarter ever in terms of creating cost savings. Between April 1 and June 30, 2020, the program facilitated $4.26 million in savings for its participating institutions. This number was calculated by comparing the actual spend on IT tools, licensing, and services to what organizations would have

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Cybera’s shared procurement service adds audiovisual / Adobe licensing services

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The Cybera-operated Alberta ShareIT Program provides cybersecurity and training services to Alberta’s education sector, as well as a highly valued cost-saving procurement service. This procurement service has now expanded its catalogue of offerings. With schools and post-secondary institutions adapting to the restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for affordable and accessible online tools

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Cybera and Alberta education institutions expand collaborative partnership

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Working with the Alberta Association for Higher Education Information Technology, Cybera will expand the learning, cybersecurity, and purchasing power of the province’s education sectors. In a move that will increase the technology capabilities of Alberta’s educational institutions, while reducing costs, the Alberta Association for Higher Education Information Technology (AAHEIT) has voted to join with Cybera’s

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UPDATED – free resources available during COVID-19

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Cybera has been notified of more tools and services being made available to education and public organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you have further questions about a specific offering, please contact us at info@cybera.ca, and we can direct you to the vendor for more information. Cybera Vendor CIRA CIRA Canadian Shield: Free DNS service to protect

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Alberta’s public shared procurement program adds communications hardware and services

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Alberta’s ShareIT public procurement program has now added a variety of telephony equipment, licensing, and services to its catalogue of offerings. The “unified communications” (UC) services will make it easier for education institutions to administer secure phone and videoconferencing tools across their entire organizations. This is expected to further ease costs and reduce workloads for

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Students in southern Alberta are learning to “hack” open data to gain in-demand technology skills

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This morning, over 100 Grades 7-12 students are learning in-demand digital literacy skills – including data analysis and coding – at the Southwest Alberta Hackathon, hosted by Cybera, the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS), and Palliser Regional Schools. Working out of the Picture Butte High School gym, students will use open data from

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Alberta’s Cost-Saving Public Shared Procurement Service Adds Vital Public Cloud Offerings

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Since it launched in 2017, ShareIT has saved Alberta’s education sector nearly $9.5 million.  Alberta educators have come to rely on cloud-based tools to deliver classroom learning content, as well as to manage their back-end operations. To meet this growing need for cloud services, Alberta’s ShareIT public procurement program has added Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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Callysto’s nation-wide classroom rollout is underway

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A free interactive learning platform that brings computational thinking, coding, and data science skills into classrooms is rolling out across the country, thanks to new funding from the national CanCode program.  Callysto is a curriculum-based learning and skills development platform for students in Grades 5-12 that is accessible from any device with an internet connection. The tool

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Easing schools’ student login headaches with Cybera’s Pika service

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Student login management is one of those little-talked-about but painfully frustrating tasks for school administrators. Each year, across Alberta, thousands of student accounts are created or updated to allow them to login to their Adobe or Google (or dozens of other) online tools, which have become foundational for modern education. But as well as creating

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The rise of online education in Alberta (and how administrators are keeping up)

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Education administrators in Alberta today face a host of challenges and responsibilities that were unheard of 20 years ago: from managing multiple learning platforms and technologies, to protecting staff and students from cyber threats and privacy intrusions. But what about the administrators at schools that have no physical buildings, but are completely online? Do they

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An Introduction to Google Secure LDAP

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More and more schools and organizations are taking advantage of sign-in tools from Microsoft Azure and Google for their authentication needs. These cloud-based services are often easier to manage than in-house systems, and don’t require any on-premise equipment. And with the increase in web services supporting logins from Google and Microsoft, there seems to be

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||The credentials students need to enter to access Pika||Pika selection page

Looking To Protect Your Students’ Data? Start With Their Login Accounts

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Protecting children’s privacy online is a top-of-mind concern for educators. But for the IT administrators tasked with this job, the “hows” of doing so can be complex and multi-faceted. One good place to start is through managing the online accounts that students create to access their learning tools (such as G Suite for Education, Adobe,

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ShareIT Adds Security Services and Knowledge-Sharing Opportunities

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As global hacks and data breaches continue to dominate headlines, Alberta educators are moving to increase the sophistication of their security tools, while collaborating on a joint line of defense. Last month, Alberta’s ShareIT procurement program added security services to its catalogue of offerings. In addition, ShareIT is now offering a learning platform for members

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