SOPPA for Teachers: A Three-Part PD Event!

In last month's edition of the #bsd220tech newsletter, we introduced you to the new state of Illinois mandate called SOPPA, the Student Online Privacy Protection Act. While we gave you an investigative overview of what this new law means for our school district beginning July 1, 2021, there is now an opportunity to go deeper and learn more about how this will impact you as an educator through a new webinar series offered by our partnership with the Illinois Digital Educators Alliance (IDEA). 

This three-part series focuses on teachers and will help you understand the legislative aspects of SOPPA, as well as how SOPPA will impact your classroom in the future. Illinois educators can earn a half-hour of Professional Development credit for each of the 3 sessions. A link to the PDH forms will be shared in the chat at the end of the webinars. 

To register for this webinar series, click here: https://ideaillinois.org/event-4240669

This Webinar Wednesday is offered after school from 4:00 to 4:30 P.M. and begins on April 21, 2021. The session is free thanks to Barrington 220’s membership in the Illinois Digital Educators Alliance and is sponsored in partnership with the Illinois Educational Technology Leaders organization (IETL).

Access Infinite Campus Training Videos Before April 30

Last fall, Barrington 220 purchased district access to Infinite Campus's National Training Week Virtual Training. All of the courses offered during that week were recorded and because of our purchase, we have had access all school year.

That window of opportunity to view these courses and receive valuable, just-in-time learning will be closing soon. So we wanted to remind you to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to help get you up to speed on just about any topic IC has to offer.

This training was wide-focused on all users of Infinite Campus, from Teachers to Administrators and everyone in between.  The window to access these videos will be closing on April 30, 2021, so please make some time now to access this amazing training opportunity if you haven't done so already! 

How to View National Training Week Recordings

P Drives (Home Directories) to be Discontinued in Barrington 220

At the end of this school year (May 28, 2021), Barrington 220 will discontinue the use of server based staff "home directories," also known as "P Drives." With the adoption of Google Drive here in Barrington 220, most of the old staff home directories have become a repository for unused documents and files. Our investigation revealed that 98.6% of the files had not been touched in over two years.

In addressing cybersecurity concerns, auditors and insurance companies have requested that we review how we store data, how our users access that data, how our data is backed up, and how our data is secured. Our evaluation of this older storage system has led to our decision to decommission it. If you still use these home directories, please remove any pertinent data and store it elsewhere—one recommendation is to use Google Drive.

As always, if you have questions or concerns in regards to the use of technology here at Barrington 220, please contact your building LTA or our tech support team at x1500 (224-655-1500).

New Ideas, Badges, and More from Apple Education

On March 23, 2021, Apple released a major refresh to the popular Apple Teacher program. The updates include Apple Teacher Portfolio—a brand new Apple Teacher feature—updates to the Everyone Can Create books, and some upcoming app updates including the Apple Classroom app. 

The Apple Teacher updates likely have something that any Barrington 220 educator can use.

Apple Teacher Portfolio

The new Apple Teacher Portfolio helps guide teachers through using Apple apps in meaningful ways in their own teaching, regardless of grade level or subject area. The projects include 21 templates and lesson ideas in apps such as Keynote, GarageBand, and iMovie. The framework allows teachers to begin with existing lessons and enhance them using a three-step process. Apple's process includes:

• Activate—Introduce ideas, activate prior knowledge, and get students excited about learning with simple warm-ups that help them think about content in creative new ways.
• Explore—Help students explore new information, connect ideas, and deepen their understanding of new material.
• Apply—Assess learning with projects that help students demonstrate mastery of new material and apply what they've learned in different contexts.

The process also offers several opportunities to reflect on each phase, and eventually leads you to earn a new Apple Teacher Portfolio recognition to add to your previous badges. 

Of course, if you have not yet started the Apple Teacher program, it’s never too late to begin—just visit appleteacher.apple.com and log in with your Apple ID.

Everyone Can Create

The Everyone Can Create books have also been updated with new content. As Apple apps add new features, new instructional possibilities emerge. Open your Books app on iPad and tap the cloud icon to download the new versions of the books. Some new content includes:

• Drawing—adds motion graphics and animation in Keynote.
• Photos—adds creating animated GIFs using Keynote, Camera, and Photos apps.
• Video—adds green screen and other special effects in iMovie.
• Music—adds podcasting features in GarageBand.

Classroom App Update (Coming Soon)

Apple also reports that they will soon update the Classroom app to allow its features to extend outside of the classroom to our remote learners. According to Apple:

“For the first time, the Classroom app will support learning beyond the walls of a school. Classroom has always connected students in the same physical space with their teachers, and soon teachers will be able to invite remote students to join a Classroom session.”

The Classroom update is coming soon, but the Apple Teacher Portfolio is available now in the Apple Teacher Learning Center (log in at appleteacher.apple.com), and the Everyone Can Create updates are waiting for you as free downloads in the Apple Books app. 

To read more about these updates from Apple, please check out the Apple Newsroom article.

New Laptops Coming for Certified Staff

On March 2, 2021, the Barrington 220 School Board approved a four-year lease to upgrade laptops of certified staff members. Our previous four-year lease for our current MacBook Air 13-inch laptops will be paid in full this year. 

As part of our recommendation, the Department of Technology and Innovation had a new choice to make: should we go with MacBook Air laptops with the Intel chip or laptops with Apple’s new M1 chip? And what are the differences that apply to us as educators in Barrington 220?

Both options are the same price and use the same design, the primary difference is the chip that powers the laptop. The Intel chip option is an “incremental upgrade” of our current model—a modest upgrade that uses an evolving technology architecture that has been in Macs for 14 years. The M1 option is brand new chip designed by Apple—their first-ever commercially available chip in a laptop or desktop. Apple calls the M1 “the most powerful chip it has ever created and the first chip designed specifically for the Mac” (Apple, 2020).

How did we decide? We researched and tested.

The Research

There is no shortage of sources regarding the performance of M1 Macs since they were announced in November 2020.

To begin, the 13-inch MacBook Air laptop itself has a different design than our current MacBook Air:

• The M1 has the same screen size as our current laptop (13.3 inches), but the M1 can show more detail.
• The M1 has nearly the same thickness as our current laptop, but it the M1 is about 1 inch smaller in width and over one-half inch less deep.
• The M1 is 0.16 pounds lighter than our current laptop.

I have observed that Barrington 220 teachers are particularly fond of keeping many, many browser tabs open—a practice that greatly affects performance and battery life (especially in the Chrome browser). Reviewers at the Wall Street Journal (2020) apparently share our affinity for Chrome tabs. They reported:

“Fifty browsing tabs? Not at a peep or a degree above 80 Fahrenheit on either M1-powered system. The Intel-powered Air? Thirty-five tabs got its fans revving, and it hit 93 degrees.” 

A reviewer at tech blog Engadget described the M1 MacBook Air as, “shockingly responsive” and added that “Safari, in particular, delivers the best web browsing experience I’ve ever had on a computer.”

The Verge, a technology/lifestyle publication, mentioned the M1 laptop’s battery life and reported, “between eight and 10 hours of real, sustained work depending on how hard I am pushing it. That’s not quite 50 percent better than the last MacBook Air, but it’s very close.”

The Testing

In order to do our own testing, Barrington 220 ordered a small number of M1 MacBook Air laptops in the base configuration immediately after they were announced. Since the Department of Technology and Innovation will eventually be supporting over 1,000 of these laptops, we wanted to be certain that they could, at minimum, run all our existing software and systems. Otherwise, we would need to stay with an Intel-based laptop.

We began by testing all our apps and systems, including everything in Jamf Self Service, our PaperCut printing system, SMART Board software, and other systems. We also tested the functions of Schoology, Seesaw, Infinite Campus, Skyward, and other primary district systems. We then tested anything we typically connect to our current laptops (using new adapters and dongles—but more on that later). 

Meanwhile, we asked a few teachers to test the M1 MacBook Air in the classroom. We selected teachers at every level and included a Barrington High School Computer Science teacher in the mix. During the pandemic, we arguably have never been more reliant on our laptops, and our tests immediately included heavy uses including videoconferencing (Zoom), many simultaneous open apps, and a need for as much flexibility as possible.

My own testing included what I consider the most resource-intensive activity in which I engage—creating and exporting videos in iMovie. After four years, the iMovie interface on our current MacBook Air laptops is usable, but has become sluggish and laggy. On our current MacBook Air, scrubbing (moving the pointer through video/audio clips) along the timeline is now best accomplished with audio scrubbing off (I prefer it on), and the days of instantly seeing a preview with no lag (latency) by hitting the space bar are over. Not so with the M1—iMovie is back to being ultra-responsive and video/audio scrubbing is instantaneous. 

My real shock happened when I exported a long iMovie project. I recorded a parent presentation on Zoom and edited it down to 1 hour, 19 minutes. On our current MacBook Air I would have expected an export time of well over 90 minutes (exports on our current MacBook Air take slightly longer than the actual length of the movie), but the M1 took 8 minutes. I initially assumed an error had occurred with the export, but when I played it back, there was no mistake!

Among the Barrington 220 teachers who tested the M1 MacBook Air, one commented that the M1 is extremely fast, especially during startup, login, and when waking from sleep mode. Another teacher noted that she Zoomed all day while sharing her screen without using a power cord, and the battery life was still at 56% by the end of the day.

Dongles, and Cables, and Plugs, Oh My...

One unfortunate, but unavoidable, issue with our switch to any new laptop is a change in ports. Our last two laptops used MagSafe power, “standard” USB (USB-A) ports, and Apple’s “Thunderbolt” (mini-HDMI) port for connecting external projectors and displays. All new Mac laptops for the past few years have switched to using just one type of port that handles all of these connections: USB-C.

Thus, we will need to provide a new set of dongles, cables, and adapters to all our certified staff when updating to the M1. You will still be able to use all your current USB flash drives, hard drives, and other devices, they will just need a USB-A to USB-C adapter. To plug our M1 laptops into our projectors, we will provide whichever adapter(s) you require for your room(s). Of course, a new power supply and cable will be provided.

Conclusion

If you follow any of the links referenced below, you will find that the reviews address far more information than I have included here. Reviewers include topics such as gaming, the M1’s ability to run iOS (iPhone and iPad) apps, and a technology Apple is using called “Rosetta 2” to help bridge older apps to run on the M1 until new versions are released—and more. This article is intentionally focused on our laptop uses here in Barrington 220.

Originally I felt that the M1 articles must be dispensing a fair amount of hyperbole. However, when I started using the M1 for myself—using Barrington 220 software on our network—I found that the reviewers had not been exaggerating. As education users, I feel that we will greatly benefit from the current and future benefits of Apple’s M1 chip.

This led us in the Department of Technology and Innovation to make a confident recommendation to upgrade our MacBook Air laptops to the new M1 version. The Board approved that recommendation. Our next step is to execute the lease paperwork (currently in process), place the order, and wait for our shipment. If all goes well, our new laptops may arrive in about six weeks. We will begin coordinating our swaps as soon as possible by working with principals. Our goal will be to swap all staff laptops before the end of the school year.

As we have done in the past, our old MacBook Air 13-inch laptops will be sold to an asset company and revenue will go back to our Education Fund.

If you have specific questions about the switch to M1 laptops, please contact our Tech Support team who conducted most of our testing (x.1500 in school or 224-655-1500). Of course, you may also contact me at any time mfuller@barrington220.org.

References

Apple. (2015). MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015) - Technical Specifications. Retrieved from https://support.apple.com/kb/sp714?locale=en_US

Apple. (2020). MacBook Air (M1, 2020) - Technical Specifications. Retrieved from https://support.apple.com/kb/SP825?locale=en_US

Apple. (November 10, 2020). Apple unleashes M1. Retrieved from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1

Engadget. (November 17, 2020). MacBook Air M1 review: Faster than most PCs, no fan required. Retrieved from https://www.engadget.com/apple-macbook-air-m1-review-140031323.html

Verge, The. (November 17, 2020). Apple MacBook Air with M1 Review: New Chip, No Problem. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/21569603/apple-macbook-air-m1-review-price-specs-features-arm-silicon

Wall Street Journal. (November 17, 2020). Apple’s M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Review: The Laptop’s Biggest Leap in Years. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-m1-macbook-air-and-macbook-pro-review-the-laptops-biggest-leap-in-years-11605621601