Media staff navigating sea of Chromebook questions

Since the first day of school, there has been a never ending line of kids trekking to the library to get help with their Chromebooks.

The Cedar Falls district has recently introduced a new password system with HelloID that students have been struggling with, and media specialist Abby Hendrickson and media secretary Sarah Herndon have been the keys in getting students’ computing troubles sorted out.

“Yes, indeed, the first two and half weeks I’ve been only focusing on the single sign on login system called HelloID. Sarah too. There was one day we had to bring on two technology coaches and two staff members from the IT department, so we had two extra support people on one day,” Hendrickson said.

After five weeks into the new school year, every student has worked out the passwords, but Hendrickson often has to help work out other small issues such as password security, Schoology, wifi, power school and printing.

Regarding the changes to the new system, Hendrickson and Herndon agreed, “Once we get things ironed out, we will prefer it, but at the moment it’s a pain in the butt because before we had multiple passwords that were hard to keep track of.” With chrome book issues slowing down, Hendrickson has been able to focus on her other responsibilities. “I love to support reading and literacy and support students with research assignments and work with staff. When they introduce research projects to their classes, I order new books for the school. I try to get the kids interested in reading.” 

For now, she’s keeping her eye on both that and pesky computing issues. “Hello ID was hard to roll out to 1,300 students all at once, but I think the students and staff were pretty patient during the process even though it was pretty frustrating and we got through the storm, and I hope that students will hopefully see the benefits. There are still a lot of little kinks to work out. Some programs are running too slow. Chromebooks need to be updated for everything to work smoothly and we are figuring out the fixes as we go.”