Welcome back! While it has been a challenging time, we hope everyone had a restful and healthy summer. We are back and working hard at the Help Desk during the first couple of weeks of school. It’s been great to see students again, but one of our challenges is keeping our work environment safe. We are implementing new health and safety procedures at the Help Desk, and these new procedures require us to take some additional time and limit the number of drop-in visits by encouraging appointments. We want to do everything we can to help students and teachers solve their issues and learn about technology while keeping them safe.

Another big change this year is the new Mosyle mobile device management (MDM) system. As we all experienced during the spring, the former system was only equipped to work while devices were connected to the school network. Students with iPads will now be able to install and update their apps anywhere they have Internet access and not just at school.

A student from last year helped me make a quick video on the restore and set up process to get the new Mosyle. In order to get it, you do need a Mac or Windows computer in your home. Any students who don’t have that or are still having problems can email me at lwong@bpsk12.org and we’ll work with them to get Mosyle. It’s important to make sure you back up anything important (usually photos and Notability files) before you do the install, and if you have questions or don’t know how to do this backup, please email me.

iOS 14 and iPad OS 14 recently came out, and one of the features you’ll need to know about it is private WiFI addresses. When you are on the BPS network, you need to make sure this is turned OFF. This features randomizes what’s known as your MAC address every 24 hours, and it will cause issues with our network identifying your iPad as a trusted device on our network.

I hope this first post of the new school year is helpful. I can see that students are very happy to be back and we’re continuing to work on interesting technology explorations while we’re trying to provide tech support too, and they’ll be introducing themselves soon when I publish their bios and their tech blogs on our site. As always, we hope to provide more resources to help you throughout the year. Best of luck to everyone and we look forward to seeing you in person or virtually at the Help Desk!