*REMC — See this month’s newsletter HERE. Some highlights are found below. Click on images to read more about it.
* The Regional Educational Media Center Association of Michigan promotes the transformative use of technology and provides Michigan schools with access to educational resources to help teachers increase student success.
While we highlighted this feature before school began (see blog post here), we continue to get questions about how to use it so are providing more details below.
Focus mode is designed with the digital learning environment in mind, allowing students to stay attentive or work on their tasks while under supervision, without being distracted by others and their tasks. This feature gives the host and co-hosts view of all participants’ videos without other participants seeing each other. This extends into screen sharing, as the host and co-host can view and switch between each participant’s shared screen, while the participants can only view their own content. If the host finds a participant’s content should be shared with others, they can easily begin sharing the participant’s screen with others.
Besides the host, co-hosts, and participants spotlighted by the host, participants in focus mode can still see their own video but only see other participants’ names, their nonverbal feedback or reactions, and hear them when unmuted.
To enable or disable Focus mode for your own use:
on the meeting toolbar.
icon is always visible in the top-left corner of the video window, next to the encryption icon, while focus mode is active.Once Focus mode has been started, participants in focus mode will only see the video of the host, co-hosts, any participants spotlighted by the host, and their own video. They will only see other participants’ names, their nonverbal feedback or reactions, and hear them when unmuted.
Participants’ shared screens are only visible to the host and co-hosts, but the host can allow all other participants to view as well:
to the right of Share Screen 
. on the meeting toolbar.Below are examples of Focus mode in a meeting. First, what the host or co-hosts see during Focus mode, followed by what a participant would see.
Host view:
Participant view when one participant is spotlighted:
BrainPop’s November newsletter for K-12 instructional staff can be found HERE.
As a reminder, all district students, K-12 can access our paid subscription to BrainPop/BrainPop Jr via Clever at https://clever.com/in/pccs
Pics below show some of what’s in their latest newsletter.
The 2021-22 edition of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook is a 75 page PDF that features Richard Byrne’s favorite tools, tips, and strategies for using a wide variety of educational technology tools in your classroom. It can be found at https://practicaledtech.com/free-handbook/
Tiny Tap is a free web service that lets you create web-based educational games or borrow from a gallery of teacher made educational and share them with students, including embedding them in Canvas if you want. Consider checking out Byrne’s post describing the service at https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2021/11/tinytap-create-your-own-educational.html
Josh Sowash’s October newsletter included
Our cell phones are threatened by bad actors more than many of us may realize. Below are the most common and critical mobile security threats and a short synapse of examples and ways to safeguard against attack..
Mobile security threats are commonly thought of as a single, all-encompassing threat. But the truth is, there are four different types of mobile security threats that we need to take steps to protect ourselves from:
Below are the most common examples of these threats, as well as steps to can take to protect ourselves from them.
Social engineering attacks are when bad actors send fake emails (phishing attacks) or text messages (smishing attacks) in an effort to trick someone into handing over private information like their passwords or downloading malware onto their devices.
Reports by cybersecurity firm Lookout and Verizon show a 37% increase in enterprise mobile phishing attacks and that phishing attacks were the top cause of data breaches globally in 2020.
The best defense for phishing and other social engineering attacks is to teach youself how to spot phishing emails and SMS messages that look suspicious and avoid falling prey to them altogether.
85% of mobile apps today are largely unsecured. Tom Tovar, CEO of Appdome, says, “Today, hackers can easily find an unprotected mobile app and use that unprotected app to design larger attacks or steal data, digital wallets, backend details, and other juicy bits directly from the app.”
For example, when someone visits Google Play or the App Store to download apps that look innocent enough, the apps ask for a list of permissions before people are allowed to download them. These permissions generally require some kind of access to files or folders on the mobile device, and most people just glance at the list of permissions and agree without reviewing them in great detail.
However, this lack of scrutiny can leave devices vulnerable. Even if the app works the way it’s supposed to, it still has the potential to mine corporate data and send it to a third party.
Review permissions carefully and typically avoid third-party apps.
Public WiFi networks are generally less secure than private networks because there’s no way to know who set the network up, how (or if) it’s secured with encryption, or who is currently accessing it or monitoring it.
For example, cybercriminals often set up WiFi networks that look authentic but are actually a front to capture data that passes through their system (a “man in the middle” attack).
If this seems far-fetched, it isn’t. Creating fake WiFi hotspots in public spaces with network names that look completely legit is incredibly simple, and people are very willing to connect, as shown by experiments run at the Democratic and Republican conventions in 2016 and by an experiment run by a researcher in 2019 from Magic.
Avoid connecting to public networks as much as possible, confirm they are legit, and do not conduct any sensitive activity while on them.
Spyware is used to survey or collect data and is most commonly installed on a mobile device when users click on a malicious advertisement (“malvertisement”) or through scams that trick users into downloading it unintentionally.
Whether you have an iOS or Android device, these devices are targets ripe for data mining with spyware—which could include your personal as well as our district data if that device is connected to our network.
Dedicated mobile security apps (like Google’s Play Protect) can help you detect and eliminate spyware that might be installed on your devices. Ensuring you keep your device operating systems (and applications) up to date also helps ensure that your devices and your data are protected against the latest spyware threats.
A 2020 study by Balbix found that 99% of the people surveyed reused their passwords between work accounts or between work and personal accounts. Unfortunately, the passwords that employees are reusing are often weak as well.
The NIST Password Guidelines are widely regarded as the international standard for password best practices. Following these guidelines will help protect you against threats from weak or stolen passwords. Password managers can simplify the work required to follow these guidelines.
Using more than one authentication factor (multi-factor authentication or MFA) to access mobile applications will also help reduce the risk that a bad actor could gain access to your systems since they’d need to verify their identity with additional authentication factors in order to log in.
Finally, implementing passwordless authentication will help you eliminate password risks altogether. For example, in the event that a mobile device is stolen or accessed illegally, requiring a facial scan as a primary (or secondary) authentication factor could still prevent unauthorized access.
Lost and stolen devices remain a threat.
First and foremost, you’ll want to know what steps to take if you lose your device. Since most devices come with remote access to delete or transfer information, that should include asking you to make sure those services are activated.
Like other data security initiatives, mobile security requires continuous work to find and patch vulnerabilities that bad actors use to gain unauthorized access to your systems and data.
However, these patches only protect if you keep your devices up to date at all times.
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You can now mark a paragraph to always begin on a new page with the new “Add page break before” option in Google Docs. This is particularly useful if you want certain paragraph styles to always create a new page such as titles, subtitles, or headings. This also means that you can import and export Microsoft Word and other third-party documents that have “Page break before” applied to paragraphs and Docs will retain that formatting.
Starting December 1, 2021: owners and collaborators of classic Google sites will no longer be able to edit any remaining classic Google Sites in our domain. Starting January 1, 2022: classic Google Sites will no longer be viewable unless they are converted to new Google Sites. If you own a classic Google site in our domain and wish to have your content remain viewable after January 1st, at some point before the new year browse to https://sites.google.com/classicsitesmanager and initiate the conversion process.
In some cases we note there are some teacher sites that receive hundreds of views a month even though they haven’t been edited in a year or more, so will suggest you review your site’s stats before possibly deciding to skip converting it. For those with lots of page views on dated sites, if you decide to convert to permit continued visitor access, you may want to at least edit your site by adding links for visitors to follow to also access content you are now more involved in curating on Canvas or elsewhere.
Take the quiz: How vulnerable are you to cyber threats?
Are you putting the district or yourself at risk without knowing it? This security assessment will help you identify whether your cyber knowledge is up to par – or if you could use a little refresher. Take the next five minutes to see where you stand.
Every month tweaks and changes occur in one or more of our Google apps. Here are two of this month’s.
Create meeting notes in Google Calendar. Available starting in late October, quickly start and share a meeting notes document for your Calendar events.
Add image watermarks in Google Docs. You can now add image watermarks directly into Google Docs.
STOP. THINK. CONNECT.™ is the global online safety awareness campaign to help all digital citizens stay safer and more secure online. They have a large collection of posters, tip sheets, and videos that you can use to promote good online safety practices. They maintain a resource page with tip sheets to posters to videos and more, to help you stay safer and more secure online and better protect your personal information. All of these resources are free to use, download and share at home, at work and in the community. We have embedded two of the many videos they have below. Here’s also a link to one of their advice posters.
Free Lesson Plans
Google for Education’s Applied Digital Skills lesson library includes a couple of lesson plans that align with Cybersecurity Awareness Month.