Watch the video recap of last week's Job Shadow Event at Managed Solution. Clairemont High School Information Technology Academy students had fun contributing to the filming, photographing and editing of the video recap from the event.

On December 8, 2015, Managed Solution hosted a Job Shadow Event for 60 students from Clairemont High School to learn first-hand critical IT skills through Junior Achievement's job shadow initiative. The collaboration kicked off Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 8- 11) which encourages students to pursue careers in STEM-related industries.
Sean Ferrel, CEO and founder of Managed Solution welcomed students, told them about the fastest growing IT company in Southern California and shared his journey of how he got to where he is today. After Ferrel answered career questions, students were split into groups to visit six project-based activities led by Managed Solution employees.
The educational job shadow program included sessions/activities on app development, coding/web design, channel partner marketing, project management, technical cloud development and video production.
Clairemont High School Information Technology Academy students had fun naming their groups and contributing to the filming, photographing and editing of the video recap from the event.
Read the press release: https://managedsolut.wpengine.com/clairemont-high-school-students-learn-critical-it-skills-through-managed-solutions-and-junior-achievement-job-shadow-initiative/
View more photos from the event on our Facebook page here.

Today Future Leaders of the Information Technology Academy from Clairemont High School Attended a Job Shadow Event at Managed Solution Headquarters

Clairemont HighSchool

Ninth grade students from Clairemont High School attended a Job Shadow event at Managed Solution today to learn more about various job positions at a technology firm. View the full press release here. More photos and videos coming soon.

Watch as #students collaborate across schools with #Sway and @Skype #WhotoYou

Skype in the classroom inspires learning

Thousands of teachers are inspiring the next generation of global citizens through transformative learning experiences.
Imagine taking your class on an "around the world" field trip or having your favorite author lead today's class. You can do both of these and more without leaving your classroom thanks to Skype. It's a great use of technology in the classroom!
Learn more about Skype for Education and explore ways to use Skype to transform your students everyday learning experiences. For more information on Education Technology Solutions call Managed Solution at 800-308-6107.
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.

Video: See How the Modern Classroom uses #Sway by #Microsoft as a Presentation Platform

The Modern Classroom Meets Sway by Microsoft

Sway integrates web video, text, social media and photo searches all right in the presentation platform - which means more time learning and less time searching and gluing and designing... All the stuff that took up the bulk of presentation prep.

Try it for yourself free today!

 

Clairemont High School Students Learn Critical IT Skills Through Managed Solution and Junior Achievement Job Shadow Initiative

Junior Achievement of San Diego logo

Clairemont High School Students Learn Critical IT Skills Through Managed Solution and Junior Achievement Job Shadow Initiative

The collaboration kicks off Computer Science Education Week which encourages students to pursue careers in STEM-related industries
SAN DIEGO, Calif. – In honor of Computer Science Education Week (Dec.7-11), Junior Achievement of San Diego and Managed Solution are partnering to impact the lives of 60 students from Clairemont High School by teaching critical IT skills and encouraging them to pursue careers in STEM-related industries.
The job shadow event is Tuesday, Dec. 8 at Managed Solution, located at 9655 Granite Ridge Drive, Suite 550 from 9:30 AM to 1:00 PM.
While spending a day at the business site, students will be exposed to real-world learning and technology. In addition to presentations on the various job positions at Managed Solution, one of the fastest growing IT companies in Southern California, employees will share life experiences and career advice through six project-based activities during the workday.
“In the world of technology we are constantly learning, so exposing our students early to real-world educational experiences is key,” said Sean Ferrel, President and CEO at Managed Solution. “I believe industry themed curriculum that incorporates career and technical courses with real-world application really prepares younger generations for careers in the industry.”
The job shadow program helps students recognize the link between academic subjects and actual workplace skills. The students learn dressing and speaking professionally, being on time and working as a team, are just as important as a strong academic foundation. In fact, providing young people with real-world learning experiences can be key to improving U.S. high school graduation rates. The experience allows students to spend quality time with a professional in a workplace setting, and to make valuable contacts for future employment prospects.
“Junior Achievement is excited to team up with Managed Solution on this important initiative,” said Marla Black, President and CEO at Junior Achievement of San Diego County. “Both organizations remain focused on how to drive impact and equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to be college and career ready.”
The educational program will include the following six breakout stations:
Video Editing & Filming
The session will introduce why videos are important in every industry and how Managed Solution uses them for marketing, as well as, creating “how-to videos” to show clients how to use certain technologies. During the exercise, students will film a portion of the day, upload and edit the video with the goal of creating an overall recap of Clairemont IT Day. Students will use a Cannon EOS 6D DSLR camera to record other breakout sessions and/or briefly speak about their experience at the event. They will then upload the video to the computer and edit it in Adobe Premire Pro. The final edited video will be uploaded to Youtube to showcase their workday experience.

Project Management

Students are challenged to create their own project management plan. They will be responsible for providing and setting-up a plan for a client to watch all the sports games from the office conference room. Students must provide insight into how long it’s going to take, and how much it will cost.

Coding/Web Design

At the coding/web design station, students will look at the elements of current web design trends and how third parties like WordPress are making it feasible for those without coding experience to create a website. Students will also see why knowing CSS is critical to making their own website template.

Partner Marketing

The station will give an overview of partner marketing and why it is valuable for an IT company to leverage partnerships. Students will then create their own partner program.

App Development / Go to Market Strategy</h3<

The station will cover the steps of building a successful mobile app - from conception to the go-to market strategy. This course is designed to show students what steps they need to take to create great cross-device mobile web experiences. This activity will focus on the discovery phase of App Development where they will brainstorm, conceptualize, design/lay out, and then create a marketing plan for their app.

Technical

The station will cover a brief overview of cloud services and how cloud technology is changing the marketplace for technical roles. Students will get to utilize cloud services and watch a demo for cloud on demand.

About Managed Solution

Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.

About Junior Achievement of San Diego County

Since 1950, Junior Achievement of San Diego County has provided life-changing programs to more than 730,000 youth—in the classroom and after school—to foster an understanding of how the “real world” works. To ensure youth are prepared for their future, JA teaches them how to get a job, start a business and how to manage money. Home to the popular McGrath Family JA BizTown and Mission Fed JA Finance Park, JA of San Diego will reach 70,000+ youth from 36 school districts during the 2015-16-calendar school year. JA San Diego receives support from more than 5,200 volunteers annually, including 48 board members, and has a staff of 22 and a budget of $3 million. For the latest news and information, please visit: jasandiego.org

Download the PDF press release here.

Contacts:
Danielle Hamra
Managed Solution
858.429.3067
dhamra@managedsolution.com
@MSMarketingTeam

Kristi Zimsky
Junior Achievement of San Diego
619.906.4926/office
404.944.0414/cell
kzimsky@jasandiego.org
@JASanDiego

Sign up to receive our educational industry newsletter:

Schools Embrace Technology for Increased Enrollment

Skype for Business in Education

Parent Focus groups reveal three important factors when parents are choosing a school. *

Among the top ten things parents in focus groups say they care about are the strength of the academic program, the vibe they get when the visit the school and how proactive teachers are in their communication about their children in particular.
The classroom is changing and schools that get ready for the next generation of educating will undoubtedly be on top with parents when they are on the search for a private school.
The focus study also revealed that parents mostly hear about schools from word of mouth. What elicits more parental chatter than parents described the new "flipped classroom" their kids participate in or the parent teacher conference they held over Skype, along with virtual field trips with great minds from countries across the globe and after school virtual homework help.
The strength of your school’s academic program is the primary reason most parents are searching for your school. Parents are searching for a school that will meet the needs of their child and challenge them to reach their potential. They want the best school that their money can buy. They want something different and better.

Here are just some of the way Technology will make the difference in academic programs moving forward.

1. Virtual FieldTrips/Visits:
Classes host a museum curator from France, who gives a short lecture on the museum’s collection from the period.
2. Flipped Classroom - Students watch the lecture off campus and work on the assignment, share notes, research findings etc.. As a group in the classroom with the teacher there to interact and push students to their full potential.
3. Virtual after school help
4. Lesson plan dashboards that include mixed media and are shared and accessed by students and parents anytime on any device.
Parents have high expectations of the faculty in that they desire to receive frequent updates on their child. Parents are paying a lot of money for a private school education. As a result, they have high expectations from the faculty. These expectations include timely communications from their teachers about their child.

Here are some ways technology will help teachers communicate efficiently with parents:

1. Automatic Translation Services - Available through Skype for Education
2. Virtual or in person parent teacher conferences - Available with Skype for education

* Parent Focus Group information sourced from http://www.enrollmentcatalyst.com/2015/01/29/10-things-ive-learned-about-marketing-from-parent-focus-groups

HOLOGRAPHIC Technology for education!

Microsoft recently unveiled Hololens, holographic technology that will transform life, business and education. Check out how Case Western is using it here.

Case Study: Pepperdine University is Enhancing Learning and Connections In and Out of the Classroom

case study pepperdine - managed solution

Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management enrolls approximately 2,000 students, many of whom work full time. Connecting and engaging busy students can be challenging, so the business school took a page from Fortune 500 companies: it uses Yammer to foster collaboration, enhance learning, and forge tighter relationships among students, faculty, staff, and increasingly, alumni.

The Yammer Solution

In 2010, the school integrated Yammer into Graziadio’s Learning Environment and Network (GLEAN). Since then, Yammer has been virally adopted by most business school students, faculty, and staff.
“We knew students wanted broader engagement, but we did not anticipate how much they’d help each other with logistical questions, IT support, business contacts, professional advice, and moral support,” says Director of eLearning Susan Gautsch. “We also didn’t anticipate the social power of Yammer, which psychologically bridges online and face-to-face experiences. It creates a strong sense of community, regardless of students’ schedules or where they’re studying.”
Students from Graziadio’s Master of Science in Organizational Development program, who come from six countries and only meet five times over two years, stay engaged using Yammer: one class of 35 students has collectively posted 6,000 messages over an eight-month period.
One popular Yammer implementation is what the business school calls Peer Connection. “It’s student driven,” Gautsch explains. “They use it to get to know each other and set up affinity groups.” For instance, students join the Marketing group to network and swap ideas about industry news and course topics.
The school’s faculty also put Yammer to good use. Many have set up private Yammer groups to facilitate and deepen class discussions. Another popular program is Classrooms Across Borders, a way for faculty to share their expertise. Students can follow topics or professors, who post open questions or share articles to generate online discussion. “It’s a great way for faculty to have more of a presence, to get what they do out there to the wider student body,” Gautsch observes.
Yammer is also popular with staff. Academic advisors use it to communicate broadly, answering questions and sending out updates on everything from upcoming meetings to traffic snarls that may make it hard to get to campus. “Our deans are getting online more and more to engage with students and alumni, which they appreciate,” Gautsch observes. She adds that, “Alumni are a growing part of our network, since students who use Yammer want to keep using it to stay engaged with the university after they graduate.”

THE RESULTS

An end to communication silos. Yammer allows faculty, staff, and students to communicate across departments and campuses.
Deeper connections. Professors and staff use Yammer to expand on classroom discussions and tighten ties with students and each other.
New networking opportunities. Full- and part-time students make cross-program connections and network with alumni through topic-driven conversations.
An ever-growing data repository. Due to its search functionality and ease of contributing content, Yammer is a valuable living knowledge base.

ABOUT YAMMER

Yammer (https://about.yammer.com) is a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network (ESN) used by more than 500,000 organizations worldwide —including approximately 85 percent of the Fortune 500 —to connect and communicate. Yammer brings together employees, content, conversations, and business data in a single location. Founded in 2008, Yammer was acquired by Microsoft and is available with Office 365, to deliver a comprehensive, seamless social experience across the applications people already use.
For more information about Pepperdine:
http://bschool.pepperdine.edu
For more information about Yammer:
https://about.yammer.com
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.

The rise of access management in education

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]access-management-managed-solution

The rise of access management in education

By Dean Wiech as written on Exclusive.multibriefs.com
The often-undiscussed importance that administrative technology has on school districts might be tantamount to suggesting that the only use for technology in a school district is in its classroom. There are far-reaching solutions that provide overwhelming benefits to the classroom, even if these technologies are not used to deliver homework to mobile devices or tally the marks of a classroom's population.
The day-to-day management of software solutions and management protocols have a dramatic impact on educational entities. And there's more to the management of learning technologies than simply passing out tablets to students.
The IT technologies required to power a school district are often not covered, yet there's a whole world of information technology and systems working in every district in the country that are doing more for the students served by the well-publicized technology of the classroom.
California's Chino Valley Unified School District has user accounts that let students access class discussions and syllabuses by email, let staff access grading systems, and even allow parents to communicate with teachers and view student grades. The challenges of managing these 34,000 user accounts was growing increasingly difficult and time-consuming for the school district.
The management of all user accounts was an entirely manual process, creating enormous inefficiencies for district IT leaders. They lacked any clear standards and consistency, and third-party scripts did nothing to simplify the situation or help with the management of accounts in other applications, such as Renaissance Learning, Riverdeep, Orchard and Easy Grade Pro.
Constant growth and limited staffing to manage the problem created a breaking point, meaning a change was needed. The district needed to streamline and find a solution allowing it the ability to automate its entire user-account life cycle.
Moving to an access management solution to automatically manage user account creation and deletion across the district and securely delegate day-to-day administrative tasks to employees proved to be the secret ingredient in the sauce. Automating operations to run in the background along with the ability to integrate the student information database and other applications saved countless hours for the IT staff each day.
The user-account provisioning process, including account creation with all group memberships, was also fully automated. As a result, students use the same user name across all applications and can use one login credential to access all accounts required by the district. Additionally, from the start of a school term or student's entrance into a school, all access points are set up correctly the first time and all subsequent updates are automatic.
Giving staff the ability to manage user access and system rights had an immediate impact for the entire district. Teachers can now solve problems with student accounts — such as a forgotten password or locked-out user account — without any technical training or administrative privileges. What used to take hours to solve involving the IT department, now takes seconds with the click of a single button.
Likewise, Culver City Unified School District, in Culver City, California, had trouble with managing an overwhelming amount of account creation and management manually. The district encompasses four elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools and several other schools, such as a language program and adult education. Among the 10 schools, they manage 800 staff members and more than 7,000 students.
The process was slow. It was extremely inefficient. In the summer of 2014, the district leadership decided it wanted to implement Google Apps for its staff and students to enhance the learning experience.
"We had originally planned to do manual exports and imports through our SIS and Google manually," Robert Quinn, technology director at the school district said. But district leadership quickly realized this would be a tremendous undertaking.
Quinn was proactive. He decided the district should look into a solution that would assist with the account creation and management process. Contacting a professional peer at a nearby school district, Quinn was told to explore access and automated password management solutions.
With the technology, Culver City USD has been able to automate its entire account management process so that no manual action is required. When a new student begins at the district, that student's information is simply entered into the student information system, and all necessary accounts and access rights are automatically created in the school's role management system. Students automatically receive a Google Apps account, and they are placed in the appropriate groups, class systems and any other actions or groups required of the district.
"When a new student joins the district, within 24 hours they have their accounts created and everything set up for them," Quinn said. "(The access management system) has been a huge life-saver for me. It probably has saved hours of my work schedule every week."
The newly automated processes ensure students quickly have their necessary accounts created and updated throughout the school year so they are able to engage in their classroom activities and after-school work. They can also engage in the education process by simply uploading documents and assignments required of the coursework.
"The teachers love how easily student accounts are created," Quinn said."They probably don't realize how difficult it would be without the access management solution."
This is no small problem, and it likely is bigger than many of the in-classroom technology solutions or issues often and overzealously covered. Access management is larger than the sample offered by Chino Valley and Culver City, and the thousands of other entities that suffer from overwhelming management and burden of these "tiny" issues.
Hutto Independent School District serves 5,411 children in the greater Hutto area of Texas. The area near Austin is one of the fastest-growing in the state.
Hutto ISD sought a secure a solution that would allow the IT staff to proactively manage its users rather than work in a reactive cycle. Hutto administrative staff had been manually creating and managing user accounts to systems and applications.
Data was often out of sync and insecure, and master info cleanups were disorganized and inconsistent. Likewise, managing more than 6,300 user accounts — students, faculty and staff — became time-consuming and forced the district to consider adding a software solution that would provide automated support and could connect with the district's Skyward student information system.
Travis Brown, network administrator for Hutto ISD, said the access management system's connection to Skyward has "saved our district considerable man hours and resources by connecting to the Skyward Student Information System to be able to automatically manage our user accounts, and we began saving immediately."
Faced with increasing budget constraints, it was important to Hutto district leaders that they chose a solution that was efficient, but cost-efficient, and could show ROI within weeks, not months or years. They also needed to implement a solution that was scalable as they increase in size and bring on new technologies for their users. They also decided they needed a solution that could have a user-managed Web portal that would take some tasks off the IT plate and put it in the hands of the faculty and staff.
Hutto ISD implemented an access management solution to manage bulk user creation, modifications and deletions. What was once a manual process has now become an automated project that runs daily for the school district.
The access management solution also has allowed the IT staff to push password reset questions and user modifications to the staff via Web portal. The Web portal lets faculty and staff reset student passwords without having to wait for an IT staff member to fulfill the request. This, on average, is saving two to three hours per request. And, because passwords can be reset by the faculty and staff, there is little to no down time for students.
Hutto ISD also added the provisioning of user accounts to Google Apps. By implementing a Google Apps user provisioning project to connect AD and Google Apps they will continue to advance technology to the school district in a smart, proactive way without exhausting man hours or additional resources. The connection to Google Apps projects will run daily with the previous synchronization projects.
The point of these technology implementations is there are many more complex issues with IT and technology challenges within school districts than are often discussed or covered. While the in-classroom technology is the current sexy topic, it's only one small portion of the challenges faced by districts throughout the country.
Additionally, without such "internal" solutions to handle many of these management and access issues, students wouldn't be able to use their devices and other technologies in the classroom anyway.

Source: http://exclusive.multibriefs.com/content/the-rise-of-access-management-in-educatio

Sign up to receive our industry newsletter:


[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]