2022 MID-NEBRASKA POWERSCHOOL CONFERENCE
ESU 10 recently hosted our 11th Mid-Nebraska PowerSchool Conference which was the 10th year in a row. This year’s hybrid event gathered PowerSchool administrators, secretaries, counselors, and school administrators on-line and in Kearney on June 7th and 8th. PowerSchool Insider creator and host, Jason Springel, was our remote keynote speaker who led off our event sharing recent PowerSchool updates. Springel also presented individual sessions on graduation planning and asset management within PowerSchool.
Other featured presenters included Adrian Carlson, Chris Rogge, Kristi Kuhns, each provided eight engaging sessions over the course of the two-day conference. ESU 10 staff including Wayne Wiens, Ellie Schroeder, and Nathan McClenahan also presented several sessions on popular topics for our audience. In all, participants were able to choose from 14 presenters, in 38 unique sessions out of the 49 total sessions offered.
This year’s hybrid event required our staff to be Zoom jockeys supporting the remote participants. This helped our presenters focus on their content and provide local technical support within each conference room while extending our reach to those who weren’t able or chose not to travel. We also had the highest registered participants in the event's history with 143.
EDUROAM USAGE CONTINUES TO EXPAND
“eduroam (education roaming) is the secure, world-wide roaming wireless service developed for and by the international research and education community. eduroam allows students, researchers, and staff to roam and find connectivity at more than 2,500 locations in the U.S., and more than 33,000 worldwide.”
ESU 10 participated in an early pilot project with Network Nebraska to test the implementation of eduroam along with several of our schools. Now in the second year of the initiative, 19 member schools have implemented the Wi-Fi network within their district.
Recently the Governor’s office announced the availability of funds to help support and incentivize more districts to implement the eduroam program. We are actively seeking to find ways to assist and promote the program by discovering needs and identifying equipment for schools that meet the funding requirements. Some of those options may be RADIUS servers, user access software, or other Wi-Fi connectivity equipment. We are quickly exploring an idea of combining these resources to centrally host and manage the needed software at our facility and will be asking schools to provide their interest and feedback.
Another opportunity would be to find other local organizations and businesses to implement eduroam and allow guest and customers to connect to Internet resources. Attached is a report from eduroam showing where eduroam guests in our building “roamed” from in the month of May.