The Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework is crucial in addressing students’ varying needs. Download this free toolkit to set MTSS meeting norms and agendas, analyze data, and set growth action items. Every student deserves the right support – use our toolkit to ensure they get it.
What’s in the toolkit?
MTSS has become a vital framework in classrooms nationwide, addressing the diverse needs of students. By combining academic and behavioral strategies, MTSS ensures that every student, from those who excel to those who struggle, receives the right level of support.
This toolkit will provide you with everything you need to:
Worried about what might happen if your school district suffers a data breach?
You’re not alone. Schools across the United States are bracing for impact, awaiting the day a malicious incident puts their cybersecurity strategy to the test. And, as cybercrime rises worldwide, it’s only a matter of time before it does. In the spirit of planning ahead, let’s discuss how to recover from a cyber attack so that you can better protect your students from a future security breach.
ATLANTA – October 19, 2023 – CENTEGIX, the industry leader and largest wearable safety technology provider for K-12 education, announces the launch of its CENTEGIX Safety Platform™. The cloud-based, integrated solution initiates the fastest response time to safety incidents campus-wide.
The CENTEGIX Safety Platform™ unites powerful market-leading solutions including:
CrisisAlert™, the most used wearable badge-based incident response solution with over 600,000 badges deployed;
Partner Integrations Layer to minimize the time to identify, notify, and respond to an emergency for better outcomes.
The design of the Safety Platform is grounded in CENTEGIX’s experience supporting school districts with rapid incident response for hundreds of thousands of everyday and extreme emergencies.
“Time is the single most critical factor in an emergency, because every second matters,” said Brent Cobb, CEO of CENTEGIX. “Districts spend years preparing for and working to prevent emergencies. When an incident happens, it’s the time that it takes to respond that matters the most. With our CENTEGIX Safety Platform, we’ve taken linear phases of response and compressed them to happen all at once, so that help can arrive as quickly as possible.”
CENTEGIX built the Safety Platform specifically to reduce response time during an incident:
Identification Time: CrisisAlert provides the ability for all staff to quickly, easily, and discreetly indicate that there is an emergency. With CrisisAlert, all staff are empowered to identify incidents by simply pushing the button on their CrisisAlert badge. CrisisAlert is always available and works anywhere on campus because it operates on a private, managed network and does not depend on Wi-Fi or cellular, which have coverage gaps.
Notification Time: For a campus-wide alert, CrisisAlert accelerates emergency communication to everyone onsite through full audio and visual notifications, directing all to follow safety protocols and directly alerting local 911 emergency resources, also with precise location information. With Emergency Response Integrations, the Safety Platform automates notification steps to reduce human error and delays with manual hand-off steps.
Response Time: Onsite response teams immediately receive the CrisisAlert alert notification with a Safety Blueprint map showing who needs help and precisely where they are located. The Safety Blueprint map also displays where safety and security assets are available to eliminate time spent searching for these resources. Local 911 takes action to neutralize the situation.
“Using the CENTEGIX Safety Platform has helped us strengthen our culture of safety and improve response times for everyday and extreme emergencies. Staff appreciate having a CrisisAlert badge so they are empowered to improve safety in their schools. Our Response teams value Safety Blueprint for the precise location of incidents notified by CrisisAlert and the ability to see the location of safety assets,” said Chris Farkas, Deputy Superintendent of Operations, Hillsborough County Public Schools (FL), the 7th largest district in the U.S.
About CENTEGIX
CENTEGIX is the industry leader of wearable safety technology for K-12 education with over 600,000 badges in use. The cloud-based CENTEGIX Safety Platform™ initiates the fastest response time for emergencies campus-wide. Leaders in over 11,500 locations nationwide trust CENTEGIX’s innovative safety solutions to empower and protect people. To learn more about CENTEGIX, visit www.centegix.com
For Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we’re sharing a few highlights from the guide — now available in more than 30 languages — plus other helpful resources. Admins can also sign up for our Safer Digital Learning event on October 25, where we’ll demo more of the guide’s security features and best practices to keep schools safe from cybersecurity threats.
The importance of cybersecurity tools for schools
Educational institutions are top targets for cyberattacks, with bad actors looking to exploit schools for their own profit. Forty-six percent of schools which have yet to be targeted believe they’ll eventually be attacked.
We’re committed to helping schools keep data secure and digital learning environments safe. Our education products, like Google Workspace for Education and Chromebooks, can improve schools’ cybersecurity and make it easy to implement the recommendations in our guidebook.
With Google Workspace for Education, admins can get a complete view into security with notifications, alerts and actions in the alert center. They can also manage access to tools with two-factor authentication, single sign-on and password management, set their own data rules and policies with data loss prevention.
Meanwhile, Chromebooks are highly secure, scalable and easy to use thanks to their built-in security features. In fact, there has never been a reported ransomware attack on any business, school or consumer ChromeOS device. And they help protect schools from evolving threats with 10 years of automatic software updates.
By Jeff Janover VP of Security & Interoperability, ClassLink
In today’s digital landscape, hackers and bad actors have developed increasingly sophisticated methods. Their main goal is to steal personal information for malicious purposes and wreak havoc on your system. There are many digital pitfalls. However, there are plenty of protective measures you can take to keep your school safe. Fortifying your cybersecurity skills can help shield school systems from cyber attacks. Below are some cyber preparedness tips to help safeguard your school’s data:
Identify fake websites. Bad actors often create deceptive sites aimed at harvesting personal data, employing URLs that closely mimic legitimate ones. Always double-check a URL before engaging with a website. Fraudulent URLs might use subtle variations like numbers, letters, and dashes that may go unnoticed.
Dodge phishing emails. Be wary of phishing emails that often ask for login credentials or other personal information. Phishing attempts are deceptive because an email domain may appear similar to a trusted email account. For example, an email from staff@sunva11ey.edu is not the same domain as staff@sunvalley.edu. 💡 Notice the letter “l” is replaced by 1s in the phishing email’s domain. If you receive an email from ClassLink requesting personal information such as your login credentials, it is a phishing attempt.
Avoid suspicious links. Only click links you trust. For increased security, add commonly used links to your school’s website for students, educators, and staff to access easily. For even more security, transform any link into a LaunchPad application, bolstering both convenience and safeguarding!
Implement MFA. Use multi-factor authentication whenever possible to add layers of identity protection. ClassLink offers extensive MFA options that help secure online accounts, even if your username and password get compromised.
Implement cybersecurity training. Require mandatory cybersecurity training for all staff and students. You can create your own training or use a training service to help keep your school secure. One option is ClassLink Academy, available in your LaunchPad account! The following courses offer a robust understanding of how to protect against cyber attacks:
Security Awareness Anthology (available for ClassLink Administrators, educators, and staff)
1.1 Online Security Fundamentals
1.2 How to Protect Your Data
1.3 Phishing Attack Protections
1.4 What is Social Engineering
Directory Services (available only to ClassLink Administrators)
2.1 Scope Your Google Directory
Report suspicious activity. Unexpected logins, changes to passwords, and other unauthorized actions are examples of suspicious activity. If you notice any login attempts or password changes that seem out of the ordinary, reach out to your tech team. At ClassLink, we take all reports seriously and will work to investigate any unusual activity. Thanks for helping us keep everything safe and secure!
Take your cyber readiness to the next level with the Cybersecurity Rubric. The Cybersecurity Rubric is a free self-assessment tool that you can use to assess your school’s cyber preparedness.
Contact your dedicated Account Manager:
ClassLink
Lyle Dadian
Director of Instructional Technology
M: 414-588-9181
O: 862-203-2099 ldadian@classlink.com
When Chromebooks debuted in 2012, their affordable price tags helped make personal computing more accessible. That also made them a great fit for the education world, providing schools with secure, simple and manageable devices while helping them save on their budgets. In fact, Chromebooks are the number one device used in K-12 education globally, according to Futuresource. Plus, they’re a sustainable choice, with recycled materials that reduce their environmental impact and repair programs that help them last longer.
Today, we’re announcing new ways to keep your Chromebooks up and running even longer. All Chromebook platforms will get regular automatic updates for 10 years — more than any other operating system commits to today. We’re also working with partners to build Chromebooks with more post-consumer recycled materials (PCR), and rolling out new, power-efficient features and quicker processes to repair them. And at the end of their usefulness, we continue to help schools, businesses and everyday users find the right recycling option.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s coming, and how we consider the entire lifecycle of a Chromebook — from manufacturing all the way to recycling.
10 years of automatic updates
Security is our number one priority. Chromebooks get automatic updates every four weeks that make your laptop more secure and help it last longer. And starting next year, we’re extending those automatic updates so your Chromebook gets enhanced security, stability and features for 10 years after the platform was released.
A platform is a series of components that are designed to work together — something a manufacturer selects for any given Chromebook. To ensure compatibility with our updates, we work with all the component manufacturers within a platform (for things like the processor and Wi-Fi) to develop and test the software on every single Chromebook.
Starting in 2024, if you have Chromebooks that were released from 2021 onwards, you’ll automatically get 10 years of updates. For Chromebooks released before 2021 and already in use, users and IT admins will have the option to extend automatic updates to 10 years from the platform’s release (after they receive their last automatic update).1
Even if a Chromebook no longer receives automatic updates, it still comes with strong, built-in security features. With Verified Boot, for example, your Chromebook does a self-check every time it starts up. If it detects that the system has been tampered with or corrupted in any way, it will typically repair itself, reverting back to its original state.
You can find more information about the extended updates in our Help Center, Admin console or in Settings.
Instructure–in partnership with Hanover Research–surveyed 1,000 administrators, teachers, and assessment specialists nationwide about the role of assessment in K-12 classrooms. The educators have spoken. Here’s what they had to say.
81% of educators reported that their school’s culture is assessment-focused. This number confirms what we’ve known for years–assessment is an essential part of the learning process. We dug in to define what ‘assessment-focused’ means and–more importantly–is it enough to elevate student success?
The State of Assessment in K-12 Education research report provides insights into current assessment strategies, emerging trends, and a glimpse into the future of assessment.
What is covered:
The value of assessment literacy
Teacher and administrator perspectives
Must-have assessment qualities
How technology can get everyone the assessment data they need
The role of formative, interim, and summative assessment
LUMA, Pitsco Education’s newest programmable robot for students in Grades 4-6, is in stock and ready to ship!
Designed to get your students excited about computer science learning, it has everything you need to get started. This classroom-ready, cross-curricular robot is an awesome introduction to real-world computer science and career exploration, and we can’t wait for students to try it out.
CREATE A SAFE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT BY MONITORING YOUR DISTRICT’S CLOUD APPS FOR THESE SAFETY RISKS
Back-to-School is an exciting time of the year for everyone in your district. But it can also be stressful for a variety of reasons.
As students re-adjust to the structures of school schedules and the stresses of social interactions, passions, and conflict can boil over.
Mental health is an essential issue in our communities today. The impacts of the long pandemic and a variety of challenges in society are weighing on our children in numerous ways. We all need to do our part to help them cope with these pressures and their environment mentally, psychologically, and emotionally.
This guide is an attempt to help district leaders understand how they can use technology to detect potential student safety signals that can come up in school Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 apps. The six types of signals and examples discussed in this guide are based on stories we’ve heard from our customers over the years.
Plus, gain access to a downloadable spreadsheet with keywords/phrases for each category that you can use to help set up your cloud monitoring technology!
Teachers, you make things happen. Pitsco is so appreciative of all you do to positively impact learners. They are here to cheer you on and assist with funding more opportunities for your students.
The Pitsco Educator Grant is open to preK-college educators in traditional classrooms, out-of-school settings, and homeschool.
Applications are accepted from the first day of each month to the last day of the month (for example, the January grant application period is January 1-31).
One $350 grant will be awarded each month at the discretion of Pitsco Education in the form of a Pitsco voucher, not redeemable for cash.
The selected educator will be contacted via email and/or phone to confirm acceptance of the grant.
The $350 value can be applied across multiple transactions until the total is depleted to $0.
An educator may be awarded only one $350 grant during a 12-month period.
At a later date, Pitsco will ask each winner to share their experience using the products purchased with the grant.
