This document provides 5 tips for school principals to improve their school's technology management: 1) Require IT staff to keep regular maintenance records to ensure systems are properly maintained. 2) Use a ticketing system for IT requests to prioritize issues and track work. 3) Have IT use imaging tools to automate re-imaging computers, saving significant time. 4) Leverage mobile device management to remotely update devices like Chromebooks from anywhere. 5) Opt for cloud-managed network hardware to allow remote changes to settings without on-site access. The goal is to maximize uptime, minimize issues, and reduce IT workload and expenses.

1. TOP 5 TECH
TIPS FOR SCHOOL
PRINCIPALS
DAN KAMMEYER

2. 01 Regular Maintenance
02 Ticketing Systems
03 Imaging Tools
04 Mobile Device Management
05 Cloud-Managed Hardware
CONTENTS

3. Welcome!
After spending many years focusing our attention on the technology that powers school
networks (as well as their proper care and feeding), we’ve learned a lot, experienced a lot,
and gained some insights that have allowed us to identify some key areas that can
positively in uence the e ective management of school IT systems and their sta ’s
experience with them.
Our goal here is to share some of what we’ve learned with you in an e ort to help
you get the most out of your IT setup and keep it operating at peak performance so that
it serves you and your needs, instead of you constantly managing the needs of the
network.
While we’re only a phone call away, we would like to save you the trouble of making
that call as much as possible. Our overall goal is to eliminate or at least dramatically
minimize downtime as much as possible, as well as avoid time-consuming issues or extra
expenses by being proactive in the management of your computer network and the sta
that are responsible for it.
We hope you nd these tips helpful, and we hope you have an amazing academic year!
Dan Kammeyer, Owner
West Valley Technical Services
dan@wvtechservices.com
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4. Tip 1: Require Regular
Maintenance Records from
Your IT Staff
Years of experience has taught us that servers
require a higher level of expertise and
maintenance to keep them running without
any issues. I think it’s safe to say that we all
want our computer networks to run with as
close to ZERO issues as possible. While most
IT departments and contractors should and
usually do perform regularly scheduled
maintenance on servers, they don’t always
keep records of the results. Just like a car, it’s
a good idea to require whoever manages the
IT at your school to keep records of
maintenance activities for future reference
and for accountability. Without good
maintenance records it’s easy to get caught
up in the daily support demands and miss
what could be a critical scheduled
maintenance procedure. Should something
happen to your IT manager or service tech, the
person following them or replacing them
would be able to see all the scheduled
maintenance records at a glance and know
what’s been done and what might need to be
done. As a result, reviewing these records with
your IT staff on a regular basis is highly
recommended. Think of it like the re
extinguishers in the school. They get checked
on a regular basis and get a date-punched tag
that lets you and the team know that they will
work properly when you need them the most.
Tip 2: Use a Ticketing
System
It’s not uncommon for schools to use email
for staff to communicate with the IT
department for support requests. While this is
convenient, from what we’ve seen it
introduces some challenges and makes the
process less e cient overall. For one, it
makes it di cult to prioritize work orders, as
they may get 5 different emails from different
staff members on the same day, all with the
same “Help!” subject line. How are they
supposed to know who they should help
rst? There are always far more team
members than there are people in the IT
department, so some process of prioritizing
incoming requests is necessary in order to
keep downtime to a minimum. Using a
ticketing system will allow the IT staff to
categorize, delegate, and prioritize the
requests that they are responsible for.
Secondly, if all that’s being used is email to
manage work orders, how is the IT
department supposed to keep a meaningful
record of the work they’ve performed? If you
asked for a report showing all the work
performed over the last month shown in order
of who has requested the most help for the
purpose of identifying staff members that
may need additional training, would that even
be possible if all they had was a huge list of
random emails? With a full ticketing system,
a report like that would only be a few clicks
away!
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5. Tip 3: Have Your IT
Department Use Imaging
Tools
One of the most me-consuming projects the IT
department undertakes is having to re-image
(reload the opera ng system and so ware on)
computers on the network. This used to be a
manual process that required a member of the
support team to boot each computer from a
Windows disk and go through a lengthy setup
process.
Fortunately, there are numerous tools ranging
in price from free (yes, really) to thousands of
dollars that can make these projects far more
automated and less labor-intensive. No
school IT department should be without one,
especially for when testing software has to be
deployed to a large number of student
computers in a short period of time (I’m
looking at you, ISATs.)
Imagine if your IT department could take a
couple hours to get ready for testing season
instead of multiple days! This would also free
up a considerable amount of their time over
the summer, allowing them to focus on
integrating hardware and software upgrades
and moving the curriculum forward instead of
maintaining the status quo.
Tip 4: Use Mobile Device Management
Schools are using mobile devices like Chromebooks and iPads more and more, and once you
have more than about a dozen devices that need to be managed, it gets pretty unwieldy to keep
them updated and usable. That’s why it makes sense to look into a cloud-based device
management solution.
I say cloud-based because then the devices can be managed from anywhere with an Internet
connection, which allows students and faculty to take the devices home or to conferences without
losing the ability to properly manage and support them. Basically, it allows your IT department to
remotely deploy apps and updates without ever even needing to touch the physical device itself, as
long as it is connected to the Internet. The alternative is that your support sta would have to
manually go around to each device whenever your team wants to use a new app or when Apple
pushes out a new software update (which is about once a quarter.) Think of how much time can be
saved if all that could be done with a couple clicks of a mouse!
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6. Tip 5: Leverage Cloud-Managed Network Hardware
Have you ever needed your IT department to make a change to a setting on the network
when they weren’t at the school? Like change the wireless password or make a change to
the main Internet connection so you could view the security cameras from your smartphone,
for example? In the past, those types of settings required the IT person to be onsite in order
to make changes, but recent innovations in technology hardware allow network
infrastructures to be managed from anywhere using a web browser. Don’t ever be stuck
waiting for someone to get back from vacation again!
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7. Thank You!
info@wvtechservices.com http://wvtsboise.com (208) 477-1837