from the executive director - neonet · training lab and read more about it on page thirteen of the...
TRANSCRIPT
Newsletter Date: Fall 2012
News
Matthew Gdovin, Director
Bichsel, Teresa 601105
Bowers, Wayne 601119
Cottrill, Jennifer 601114
Dolis, Mary 601102
Elder, Cyrus 601116
Fassnacht, Kim 601120
Gdovin, Matt 601100
Hoffman, Mike 601108
Marrali, Denise 601101
Martin, Jim 601115
Nash, Lisa 601121
Peters, Kathy 601107
Tracy, Tim 601109
Schmidt, Marie 601106
Steele, Jeanne 601117
Yarian, Brendon 601112
Zolla, Chris 601110
NEOnet Phone#
330-926-3900
Inside this issue:
From the Director 1
New NEOnet Staff 2
EMIS 3
DASL 4-5
ProgressBook 6
Special Services 7
Library Services 8-9
Fiscal Services 10-11
Network Update 12
Training Lab 13
Save Voice Mail 14
DASL New Users 15
Microsoft
LightSwitch
15
NEOnet Calendar 16
The staff at NEOnet and I would like to welcome you back from what we hope was an enjoyable summer! I hope the 2012-2013 school year has
gotten off to a good start for you. Our newsletter this quarter has many new items for you to review. I would like to highlight a few of the activities going on at NEOnet.
I would first like to welcome Lisa Nash and Wayne Bowers to the NEOnet team. Lisa is the new Fiscal Services Support Specialist. She will be
responsible for providing support and training on the fiscal services applications. Wayne Bowers has been hired as the Fiscal Officer of the Council and is responsible for coordinating the Fiscal Services depart-
ment. You can learn more about Lisa and Wayne on page two of this newsletter.
We have now been in our new facility for almost ten months and we continue to settle in. The 26,000 square foot facility includes an energy efficient server room, a 21st Century classroom, a 125 seat conference
room, twenty-four station training lab, staging center, board room, video conferencing lab, and office space for thirty employees. This new space will allow us to expand our training offerings and to be a showcase for
new technologies. The facility is also available for use by our school districts. If you are planning a conference, training, or retreat please consider using your new facility. There is no cost for the member
schools to use our training rooms. If you have not been out to see our new place, give me a call and I would be happy to show you around!
The most recent addition to the facility is the completion of our training lab. The training lab now includes twenty-four workstations which is double the size from the old lab. The old hardware has been replaced
with new Thin Clients and larger monitors. You can see a picture of the training lab and read more about it on page thirteen of the newsletter.
I have highlighted a few of the important activities happening at NEOnet but there is much more information within this edition. I hope you are able to take advantage of all our services. Please feel free to contact me
at 330-926-3902 or [email protected] if you have any questions about the contents of the newsletter. Please remember without you there would be no NEOnet!
From the Executive Director
Page 2
New NEOnet Staff
Wayne Bowers is the new Fiscal Officer/Coordinator of
Fiscal Services for NEOnet. He comes to us from Portage
Lakes Career Center (PLCC) where he worked as their
Assistant Treasurer. Before PLCC, he worked for 8 years as
the Accountant for Twinsburg City Schools. Prior to that, he
served as an Assistant Auditor for the State of Ohio Auditors
Office for 6.5 years. He has a BBA in Accounting from Kent
State University and holds a school treasurer’s license. In
his spare time Wayne enjoys spending time with his family,
and is a member of the Cleveland Area Mountain Bike
Association race team.
Lisa Nash is the new Fiscal Services Support Specialist at
NEOnet. Most recently, Lisa was a Business Analyst at
Bowling Green State University for the Office of the Bursar
where she performed maintenance and training on financial
and human resource systems. During her time at the
university, Lisa worked on two system implementations and
three system upgrades, including addressing interface
issues. Lisa has a Bachelor’s of Science degree from Bowling
Green State University.
NEOnet would like to introduce our newest staff members, Wayne Bowers, Fiscal Officer/
Coordinator of Fiscal Services and Lisa Nash, Fiscal Services Support Specialist.
Page 3
EMIS Services
Mike Hoffman at x601108
Mary Dolis at x601102
By September 30, 2012, ODE is scheduled to release preliminary data for the 2011-2012 Local Report Cards in
spreadsheet format. This was decided after an extensive audit into alleged attendance reporting irregularities.
ODE continues to receive public record requests for school district data. For more information on the
2011-2012 LRC, go to the ODE website under Accountability - “2011-2012 Local Report Card FAQ”.
ODE has made major changes to the EMIS Manual Format for FY13:
Manual is no longer published by Fiscal Year, updated by reporting period
New Sections grouped by data type
All appendix information and file layout is included with the related section
The new version of the EMIS Manual is available at the ODE EMIS website “EMIS Documentation.”
There are fewer EMIS Changes for FY13. Included in the changes:
Resolve issues around court placed reporting for students attending ESC
Review reporting rules as to when district should update admission dates
Refine the reporting of students in courses. More level I checks
How to report students in Peterson Scholarship Program
Non-Public Special Education reporting
Student Summer Withdrawal record (optional)
Add IEP outcome for Correctional Facility
Add Special Education Event type for Amended IEP
Secondary Planning Element from 16 years old to 14
Collect County of Residence for students to determine disbursement of casino revenue
New CTE Subject Codes
Licensure requirement for new PE teachers to district
NEOnet FY13K EMIS Meeting Tuesday, October 9, 2012
NEOnet – Room B
9:00 am – 12:00
*Open Lab dates are available on the
NEOnet Homepage under EMIS Services
DASL Page 4
Student Services x601140 Jennifer Cottrill x601114
[email protected] [email protected]
New Lock & Scroll Feature
In the 13.0 release a new lock & scroll feature was
added to the Student Profile & Courses screens.
You are now able to select a tab and when scrolling
to the next record the selected tab retains.
A good example for student profile would be:
Use Advanced Search to find all the 10th graders in your
building.
Choose the 1st student in
your list and go to their
Student Profile. Then click
on the FS-Standing Tab.
Use the scroll buttons next to the [Find Students] box to scroll to the next student. The next student’s
profile will stay on the FS-Standing Tab
This same lock and scroll
feature works on the courses
screen (Management » School
Administration » Scheduling
Administration » Course
Maintenance » Courses)
DASL Page 5
Several reports in DASL give you the option of creating mailing labels for the students. In order to get your labels to
align correctly on your label sheets you must have your Adobe page settings adjusted.
If you have upgraded to Adobe 10 you must now select the following options on the print screen:
Size Options: Actual Size and Orientation: Portrait
If you are still using Adobe 9 or prior versions the Adobe page settings will remain as in the past:
Page Scaling: None and Auto Rotate & Center: Unchecked
DASL/EMIS Open Labs
October 16, 2012 9:00—11:00
November 1, 2012 1:00—3:00
November 15, 2012 9:00—11:00
November 29, 2012 1:00—3:00
December 20, 2012 1:00—3:00
Page 6
ProgressBook
Kathy Peters
x601107
Denise Marrali
x601101
Did you know about the New Parent Access?
The parents now set up a secure account using identification keys provided by the district. They are able
to link multiple students to the one login. Should they forget their user name or password, there are
links on the page to assist them.
Once logged into their account, the website has a new look providing a quick summary of Grades, Home-
work, Assignments and Attendance.
One click will give you details for a specific class -
Please contact your ProgressBook
Administrator for further details!
Sps Special Services Page 7
Sps User
Committee Meetings
for school year
2012 –2013
December 7, 2012
February 22, 2013
May 10, 2013
Denise Marrali x601101
Kathy Peters x601107
What’s new! The new IEP Summary Link and Report under Completed Tasks tab.
The IEP Summary Report is a summary of the last completed IEP task and has the following features:
Opens a summary of the last completed IEP task and includes goals, objectives, services, etc.
Under the IEP Summary Page, users can select a school and student from the drop-down list and filter
by student’s last name to limit the amount of students that appear in the student drop-down list.
Above the IEP Summary Report title, user can click the Save As icon to save the IEP Summary report to
Excel, PDF or Word.
The best way to print this document from all browsers is to click on the Save As icon and choose PDF.
This will pop up in a new screen and the user can click the printer icon on the document. When using
Internet Explorer, users can use the Print icon.
Users can click the View Task Link and this will open the entire IEP Task.
Library Services Page 8
Ask, Act, Achieve
Ask, Act Achieve (Go INFOhio) breaks the research process down into three major steps. This site is
intended for middle school and high school students. Each step asks key questions that link students to
INFOhio resources, forms and reliable websites. The Teacher’s Guide offers additional resources that
address each of the components, including KNR (Know, Need, Resources) and KWL (Know, Want, Learn)
forms for the student to use, the specific INFOhio resources that correspond to the research project, a
guide for evaluating sources, and various forms for mapping an essay. The Teacher’s Guide offers
suggestions on how to use Google Docs, Diigo, and Popplet for group projects. It also includes a
plagiarism tutorial, citation help, creating a digital story with Animoto, multimedia presentations with
Voice Thread, videos with Masher and posters with Glogster. There are tips to publishing online and
various methods for evaluating the project including, research rubrics, creating a survey with Survey-
Monkey and Poll Everywhere.
When a student clicks on a question, a page with resources tied to that question will open.
Ask: Asking the right questions:
How do I decide on a topic?
What do I already know?
How do I begin my research?
Act: Taking appropriate action:
How do I find valid information?
How do I decide what information will answer my questions?
How do I organize my work?
How do I work with others in a group?
Achieve: Achieving results
How do I present my project?
How do I publish my work?
How do I evaluate my project?
Library Services Page 9
Jim Martin x601115
Jeanne Steele x601117
INFOhio has created a toolkit for educators and parents on the Common Core. The toolkit can be accessed
online at http://www.infohio.org/index.php/infohiotoolkit/toolkit-commoncore. The site includes not only
background information on the Common Core but also information on INFOhio resources that support key
Common Core concepts. These are resources that educators can download and start using in the class-
room today. Available resources include PowerPoint presentations, ranging from a presentation on basics
(51 slides) that covers key Common Core concepts and INFOhio resources to support them in the class-
room, to one with an in depth coverage (106 slides) that gives an overview of the many INFOhio resources
that support the Common Core.
The INFOhio instructional team has created a Symbaloo gallery for Ohio K-12 educators. The Symbaloo
gallery contains a wide variety of national Common Core resources including lesson plans, crosswalks,
videos, and more. The INFOhio Symbaloo gallery is located online at
http://www.symbaloo.com/shared/AAAABrFMHFcAA42ACpCzRA== or by using the link located on the
Common Core tool kit.
One of the newest Common Core resources added to the site is titled “INFOhio Resources for the Third
Grade Guarantee.” During the 2013-14 school year, all third grade students will be required to read on
their grade level before advancing to the fourth grade. This two-page flyer links you to the no-cost tools
INFOhio has created or made available to help students, teachers and parents work together to encourage
reading literacy for your PreK to 3rd grade students.
The Learn with INFOhio! webinar series includes one on the Common Core titled “Common Core Tools You
Can Use from INFOhio,” where attendees learn about a variety of INFOhio Common Core resources that
focus on the literacy standards and college and career readiness. Future and past webinars can be found
online at http://www.infohio.org/educator/webinars.html. Learn with INFOhio webinars are one hour
sessions for classroom teachers, librarians, curriculum coordinators, guidance counselors and technology
coordinators. In the event an educator is unavailable to attend the live online webinar, recorded copies can
be found listed under the “Webinars Recording Archive” section. Attendees of both the live and recorded
sessions have the option to participate in an assessment review quiz. Those with an 80% or higher score
on the quiz will receive a certificate of completion worth one contact hour of professional development.
Page 10
Fiscal Services
Teresa Bichsel x601105
Wayne Bowers x601119
Lisa Nash x601121
Employer Sponsored Health Care Reporting Required in 2012
The Affordable Care Act requires employers to report the value of the health insurance coverage they
provide employees on each employee’s annual Form W-2. The value of the combined contribution of
both Employee and Employer, although not a taxable benefit, will now be reported in box 12 of the W-2
using Code DD.
A flag was added to the USPS DEDNAM file to allow this to be easily reported from the USPS employee
deduction screens. If you are currently using USPS deduction screens to track the employee and board
amounts this should be a smooth process once the flag is set in the deduction master file.
For those Districts not currently tracking employee and employer health insurance costs in the USPS
deduction screens, the process will be different. A field has been added to the USPS Federal Tax Record
to report this information. Loading the value of employer sponsored health insurance coverage to this
field will likely be done from an outside source, such as an Excel spreadsheet.
State Software Rewrite Update
The State Software Development Team (SSDT) continues to work diligently on the rewrite of the USAS
and USPS Open VMS/Cobol versions. While no final release dates have been set, progress is being made.
USAS-R Milestone #4
This is the third public milestone release of USAS-R. With this milestone release, the SSDT continues the
process of testing and qualifying aspects of the new system. This milestone should be more interesting
than previous milestones, as it includes a fairly significant restructuring of the USASWeb menu.
The goals of this milestone include the evaluation of a new and revised user Interface. The original
sidebar menu has been removed and replaced with drop-down menus across the top. All menu options
have been cleaned up to streamline the look and feel of the application. Additionally, create and load
functions are now available from the main query pages for each option.
The following new user interfaces appear under the Admin tab; Users, Roles, Custom Fields, and Posting
Periods (partial implementation).
USPS-R Milestone #3
This is the first public milestone release of USPS-R. With this milestone release, the SSDT begins the
process of testing and qualifying aspects of the new system. This release has been made very early on in
the software design process and it is not in any way near a production capable system. Much of the
system is incomplete and does not function.
Fiscal Open Labs
October 11, 2012 9:00—3:00
November 13, 2012 9:00—3:00
December 18, 2012 9:00—3:00
Page 11
Fiscal Services
5 Year Forecast Fiscal Year 2013
The period to submit the initial 5 Year Forecast for FY2013 should open on October 1, 2012
and end October 31, 2012. As in the past, we expect ODE to limit us to a brief submission
time on the 31st. We have a training scheduled on October 12, 2012 for anyone interested
in learning the process. We will continue to submit the forecasts for you, as we have done
in recent years.
SSWAT Retirement
The NEOnet Fiscal Team has established an official retirement date for SSWAT to take effect
January 1, 2013. In an effort to help with this transition from SSWAT to USAS Data Warehouse
(USASDW), NEOnet will be offering a new training class on October 17, 2012 and January 30, 2013.
This class will use USASDW along with a variety of EXCEL features including the charts wizard. This is
hands-on training to expand district use of USASDW.
USASDW (USAS Data Warehouse) is a web-based tool used to look up current and historical USAS data.
USASDW replaces SSWAT and provides a point-and-click web interface that makes it more user friendly.
The data viewed in USASDW is read-only so the information cannot be changed or modified. The data is
loaded every evening, so the database contains all transactions, except those posted on the current
date. Users can view account, vendor and other detailed transaction data. USASDW also has the ability
to extract the requested data into a CSV, tab-delimited or EXCEL spreadsheet. Users can pull the data
into EXCEL and use the chart wizard provided in EXCEL to create a variety of graphs.
Additionally USASDW provides additional security categories. In conjunction with the username and
filters created in the Security Profile Maintenance (USASEC), you can use this to limit the accounts a user
has access to in USASDW. Additionally you can select one or combinations of the following areas to grant
a user access to:
Account: allows user to generate account queries
Vendor: allows user to generate vendor queries
Transactions: allows user to generate purchase order, invoice, check and receipt queries
Requisitions: allows the user to generate requisition queries
Accounts Receivable: allows the user to generate ARF queries
Period H Fiscal 2012 Year End Reporting for Financial Data and Capital Assets
The submissions period has not opened yet, but information we received recently from
ODE indicates that both FY2012 year-end financial reporting and FY2012 capital assets
reporting will be due by October 15, 2012. We will begin submitting information to
ODE as soon as they open the submission period.
NEOnet Network Update Page 12
Technology Advisory Committee Meetings
2012-2013
All Technology Advisory Committee Meetings will be held at
NEOnet in Room B at 9:00 a.m.
October 4, 2012
November 1, 2012
December 6, 2012
January 3, 2013
February 7, 2013
March 7, 2013
April 4, 2013
May 2, 2013
Welcome to another exciting year of improving student education through the use of
technology. School districts have never seen more of a reliance on technology to assist
teaching as they have seen over the last twelve months. Initiatives like one-to-one
computing and bring your own device have brought about the need for enterprise level
wireless connectivity in the classroom. The need for fast and secure wireless has also
brought challenges such as how to manage the devices our students use and how to
maintain CIPA compliance. NEOnet is here to help with all of these impending technology
hurdles.
Our hosted Cisco wireless service can help offer districts the enterprise wireless solution
they need at a low price point by centralizing the access point management and deploying
the service from our state-of-the-art data center down to the building level securely and
efficiently. The Cisco NCS software allows delegation down to the district level to manage
certain aspects of the wireless solution so that each a customer can actively be hands on
with administration. A customer can actively monitor clients, look at coverage areas to
see where they might need to expand their wireless service, identify access points that
aren’t functioning properly and see rogue wireless access points that should not be on
their network. Security and CIPA compliance are also major factors with one to one and
BYOD initiatives, and we have the solution you need. Our wireless solution as well as our
Lightspeed content filter can tie into any LDAP server to provide user based access control
and detailed reporting so that your students can get access to the resources they need
quickly and efficiently. If you are interested in a participating in the service please
contact [email protected] for demonstration of how this solution can empower your
district.
Chris Zolla, Assistant Director
X601110 [email protected]
Technical Services Page 13
Training Lab Update
NEOnet has updated its training lab to meet the needs of our customers. If you’ve been to our new
location you already know the new lab is much bigger, quieter and of course more pleasant to visit
overall. But you may have also noticed that we were still using the machines from our old lab and that
there was plenty of space for more to be setup. Now that we’ve had a chance to settle into our new
surroundings we have taken this next step. First off, we have doubled the number of available seats that
can be used per training to twenty-four. This will be a welcome change to attendees as well as
trainers. Secondly, we have replaced all our current hardware in the lab with brand new Thin Clients and
larger monitors which will allow us to deliver different types of operating environments as needed
depending on the type of training taking place. This will help us be able to be more flexible and
adaptable to constantly evolving technology. Our goal is to provide our customers with quality training
and a positive training experience. It is our hope that this new environment with updated hardware will
help provide just that.
Tim Tracy, Network Services
X601109 [email protected]
Page 14
Technical Services
Cyrus Elder, Technical Services
X601116 [email protected]
How do I save voicemail messages and not use all of my available space in my voicemail box?
About a year ago we upgraded to a newer version of Cisco Unity (the product that runs our voicemail
system). Since that time, a few users have noticed that in addition to an email space quota they now
have a voicemail space quota. Prior to this upgrade there was only one quota, your email account quota.
This was because of the way the older versions of Cisco Unity interacted with the older versions of
Microsoft Exchange. With prior Unity products all of your voicemail messages were delivered to exchange
and were stored inside of your email account right along with any email messages. Even though these
messages were stored inside of your email account they were still readily available from your phone.
With the new version of Unity, your messages are no longer delivered to your email account. They now
remain in a separate voicemail account on the Unity server even though they are still accessible from
inside of your email. Just like your email account, this voicemail account has a space limitation or quota.
Most users have a quota of 40 megabytes unless more has been requested. While that doesn’t sound like
much space keep in mind the average voicemail message is roughly 30 seconds and uses slightly less
than 1/3rd of a megabyte of space. So a 40mb mailbox is capable of storing around 60 minutes of
voicemail messages. While this is a decent amount of space to store messages, some users need the
ability to store voicemails indefinitely and not utilize the space in their voicemail box.
This can be achieved by creating
a folder outside of your Inbox
and then dragging the email
containing your voicemail to that
folder. The most important part
here is creating the folder out-
side of your Inbox. You do this
by right clicking on your name
and selecting create new folder.
Please keep in mind the folder must exist outside of your
inbox. If the folder exists inside of your Inbox the
voicemail message will remain in your voicemail account
and will count against your space quota. Once the folder
has been created outside of your Inbox you can then
drag and drop a message from your Inbox to the folder.
Doing this will create a new copy of the message in that
folder. The message in your voicemail box will be moved
to the deleted items folder and will automatically be
purged once the message has aged 14 days.
Page 15
Technical Services
QUICK TIPS: Adding Users into DASL
NOTE: All new users must ALWAYS be added in EmpowerID prior to being added to DASL.
Search for the user that is being added in “User Search” (we recommend search via the actual
username e.g. cf_doej)
Verify that all the information that populates in the fields is correct.
Select a “Default School” and an “Administrative School” from the drop-down
Click on “Add to DASL” – this will add the username into DASL
Once this user is listed under “Users” your DASL admin will then need to associate this username
with the respective staff account so that it will flow over into ProgressBook
**NOTE: This will occur overnight, so the user will be able to login to ProgressBook the day after
they have been added to DASL.
Marie Schmidt, Technical Services
X601106 [email protected]
Mike Hoffman, Technical Services
X601108 [email protected]
Microsoft LightSwitch
Even you can build a computer application. Microsoft LightSwitch could move you in that direction. What
is Lightswitch? Microsoft defines it as:
“A simplified self-service development tool that enables you to build business applications quickly
and easily for the desktop and cloud.”
What does this mean? The aim of this program is to allow non-developers the ability to create an
application with very little coding (if any). LightSwitch has a specific way programs should be built and
sticks to that template. If you have ever worked on or created a spreadsheet or passed around a link to
an Access database for everyone to open, this may be the tool for you. The application may not be the
most visually pleasing you have ever seen, but it will be functional and do a much better job than
anything we have seen before. So give it a try and see if it is the solution you are looking for.
Trial Download: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26830
Other useful links:.
Understanding Visual Studio LightSwitch: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj618303.aspx
Creating your First LightSwitch Application: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff852059.aspx
Walkthrough: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee256749.aspx
QUICK TIPS: Adding Users into DASL
NOTE: All new users must ALWAYS be added in EmpowerID prior to being added to DASL.
Search for the user that is being added in “User Search” (we recommend search via the actual
username e.g. cf_doej)
Verify that all the information that populates in the fields is correct.
Select a “Default School” and an “Administrative School” from the drop-down
Click on “Add to DASL” this will add the username into DASL
Once this user is listed under “Users” your DASL admin will then need to associate this
username with the respective staff account so that it will flow over into ProgressBook
**NOTE: This will occur overnight, so the user will be able to login to ProgressBook the day after
they have been added to DASL.
Marie Schmidt, Technical Services
X601106 [email protected]
NEOnet Calendar 2012 Page 16
October 2012
4 9:00—11:00 Technology Advisory Committee Room B
9 9:00 FY13 October Checklist—EMIS Room B
9 8:30— 3:30 INFOhio Reports Training Training Lab
10 9:00—10:30 Educational Operating Committee Room B
12 10:00—12:00 5 Year Forecast Submit Training Training Lab
17 1:30—3:30 USASDW and Excel Charting Training Room B
18 12:00—2:00 Treasurer’s Operating Committee Room B
19 9:30—11:30 USAS Roundtable Room B
24 8:30—11:30 INFOhio Basic Cataloging Training Lab
24 12:30—3:30 INFOhio Open Lab Training Lab
26 9:00—11:00 USPS Roundtable Room B
November 2012
1 9:00—11:00 Technology Advisory Committee Room B
5 9:00 MRSC Board of Directors Board Room
5 10:00 MRSC Assembly Rooms A&B
8 9:00—3:00 Excel I Beginner Training Training Lab
9 9:00—3:00 Excel II Intermediate Training Training Lab
15 8:30—12:00 Media Services Committee Room B
15 12:30—3:30 INFOhio Open Lab Training Lab
22-23 CLOSED Thanksgiving Holiday CLOSED
27 1:00—3:30 ARF Accounts Receivable Training Training Lab
28 8:30—3:30 INFOhio Database Cleanup I Training Lab
December 2012
6 9:00—11:00 Technology Advisory Committee Room B
7 8:00—12:00 SPS User Meeting Room A
7 9:00—11:30 USPS Calendar Year End Room B
11 8:30—11:30 INFOhio ALA Read Poster Training Lab
11 12:30—3:30 INFOhio Open Lab Training Lab
11 9:00—11:00 ProgressBook/DASL Roundtable Room A
14 9:00—11:30 USAS Calendar Year End Room B
20 12:00—2:00 Treasurer’s Operating Committee Room B
24-25 CLOSED Christmas Holiday CLOSED