KES TST Bits & Bytes
Introducing the new and improved way to get help with your technology needs!!!
The department of technology has been working hard on streamlining their service desk. They are also highly encouraging us to have teachers enter all of their own tickets.
And so, from now on, if you need help from me in any way, I am asking for you to put your request in through the service desk. As always, I will address true emergencies if you catch me in the hallway or text me (757.816.8360) - but even in those cases, I will ask you to put in a ticket after the fact.
Help needed tends to fall into two main areas:
1. Incidents: equipment is not working (laptop, iPad, Promethean Board, etc.)
2. Requests: you would like the lab set up for your class, you need some data from me,
you need a shortcut put on your laptops, you need an app added to the
iPads, etc.
There are several ways that you can put in a ticket. The two easiest are:
1. Click on the link found at the top of our SharePoint site
2. Click on the link found in my signature (note - this link will not work from home)
Once you click on either of those links, you will see the following page. For now, you can basically ignore everything except for "New Incident" and "New Request"
As you become more proficient with service desk, I will be happy to show you the other features which will allow you to track the progress of tickets that you enter as well as some other features.
Once you click on either New Incident or New Request, the following window will opened.
Your name, the school's main telephone number, and your email will automatically be filled in. There are several optional fields:
Location - always "Kempsville ES"
Room - your room number
Barcode - the blue school ID tag number
The required fields are:
Urgency - this defaults to As Possible - please only use "Quickly" when your issue is directly affecting student learning (i.e. your laptop, ladybug, or board is not working and you are trying to teach class"
Incident Area - this is a pop-up box that narrows down your issue (i.e. hardware, internet issues, etc.)
Incident Description - this is the most important area and it is very important that you are as detailed as possible. Telling me that "My promethean board is not working" is not nearly as helpful as: "My promethean board display is fuzzy and very dim" or "The projector is on but nothing is displaying on the board"
Once you have entered all of the information you can, click "Save" and two things will instantly happen -
1. you will get an email acknowledging your ticket and
2. I will get an instant notification of your ticket
I keep my phone and/or iPad with me at all times and so I will see that notification within minutes and if it is an emergency, I will be there as quickly as I can. All other tickets will be prioritized and gotten to as quickly as possible.
So why is all of this necessary????
Please trust me that I am not doing this just to give you more work to do! In actuality, this process should take you no more time than sending an email to me. This is part of a city-wide push for 100% service desk usage. The benefits of putting issues in service desk are:
1. a comprehensive record of equipment issues - meaning if a ticket is never put in when you have an issue with your laptop, there is no basis for me telling DOT (Department of Technology) that you need a replacement laptop
2. DOT is able to see as a whole, how the technology in our school is doing. If 8 or 10 promethean board tickets are put in within a short period of time, they can look into whether or not it is a bigger issue that they need to deal with
3. Your email to me, or your comment to me as we passed in the hallway will not get lost or forgotten. Your tickets sit in a work queue which helps dictate what I do each day.
Should you have any questions or concern, please let me know! I will be more than happy to help you run through the process of putting a ticket in.
I thank you all so much in advance for your help with this process!