School’s Out: Focus on Device Maintenance and Readiness for Fall
EdTech Magazine has an article this week going over some summer prep work. From inventory, repairs to pushing the latest updates to get everything ready for fall.
We're doing most of this now, so instead of the reminder, the part of the article worth looking at is something they gloss over: Working the repair queue is not the same as having a plan.
The repair queue is reactive, someone submits a ticket in April, the device was picked up and was left sitting on a shelf or in a bin then was fixed sometime in June. The devices that never had a ticket, the ones that are sitting there with no paperwork, those are the ones that come back to haunt you in August. Batteries that charge but only last 10 minutes, hinges cracked but still closing, USB ports that only work intermittently. These are the ones that are time bombs.
What to do? Spend an hour this month in the admin console pulling battery health and enrollment dates, sorting by model and purchase year, and deciding what doesn't go back out into classrooms in August. A device you know is dying you can plan around, a device you find out is dying in week two is is just another small annoyance when all of the other systems are coming online that need your attention.
Featured articles
“Technology Problems Are Easy, People Are Hard”: Lessons from Richard Platts
"Technology problems are easy, people are hard." That's Richard Platts, and CoSN has built a whole retrospective around the line. You already know it's true. You've spent a weekend cutting over a core switch without incident, then spent three weeks convincing one principal that the new sign-on flow is not, in fact, broken.
The useful part is that Platts treats this as the job, not the tax on the job. Relationships are the deliverable. Ticket volume is the byproduct.
Which is a hard case to make at budget time, since nobody has ever line-itemed trust.
Not all screen time is equal
Every district has a screen time policy, and almost none of them measure anything except minutes. eSchool News ran a piece arguing the number is the wrong metric: what matters is whether a given program actually moves a kid forward. Fine, but notice who gets handed that question. When a board member asks why third graders are on devices four hours a day, the honest answer requires usage data per application, not per device, and most of us can produce the second one in about ten seconds and the first one never.
That gap is worth closing before someone asks.
What's the coolest AI stuff your district is actually using?
Somebody on r/k12sysadmin asked what AI work districts are actually doing, and pre-emptively banned the usual answers. No NotebookLM, no MagicSchool, no ChatGPT lesson plans. Just the interesting stuff.
The thread is worth reading for what it reveals about the gap between the AI pitch deck and the AI in production. Most of what districts are running is small, unglamorous, and internal: ticket triage, translating parent notices, summarizing IEP paperwork. Nobody's transforming learning. They're clearing a queue.
Which is, frankly, the most honest AI story anyone's told all year.
Tech tip of the week
Document your IT infrastructure in a wiki this week—use Confluence, Notion, or MediaWiki
The person who knows how the phone system talks to the SIS is one car accident away from being unavailable. That is the actual risk, and no runbook in a drawer fixes it.
Pick a wiki this week. Confluence if you already pay for Atlassian, Notion if you want it running in ten minutes, MediaWiki if you want it on your own metal and don't mind the maintenance. The tool matters far less than starting.
Then write exactly five pages, nothing more: network topology with VLAN assignments and IPs, where every credential lives (the location, not the password), your DNS and DHCP configuration, the vendor list with account numbers and support contract terms, and the recovery order after an outage. What comes up first, what depends on what.
Ugly and current beats polished and stale. Screenshots, pasted config, half-sentences, all fine.
Then put a recurring calendar hold on the third Friday of every month to fix what changed.
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