Hello all - I hope you're enjoying the snow... it won't be here much longer!

According to my weather app, it'll be warming up next week; ECNO and the weather have that in common! Next Thursday, December 1st is the ECNO 2022 Annual General Meeting. I'm looking forward to wrapping another successful year for ECNO, as well as starting off a new one. We're fortunate to have a handful of great people that make up our Board of Directors, and I'm looking forward to welcoming some of them into new roles to support ECNO's growth over the next three years.

If you haven't yet registered, there's still time! The deadline to join us is Monday, November 28th. The AGM is taking place virtually or in person at The Westin Toronto Airport Hotel, 950 Dixon Road, Toronto. I'll save you some digging through your inbox - register here before 4pm on Monday.

I so look forward to seeing you all there to recap another great year and to begin a new one.

All the best,

Wayne Toms

Executive Director

The Value of Secondments

ECNO’s contribution to technology in Ontario’s K-12 education sector is due in large part to the skilled temporary staff who are recruited to lead projects and perform essential roles. These functions are typically filled by school board employees who are seconded from their current jobs. They learn new skills and expand their network and career options, while managers gain back a refreshed employee with a new breadth of knowledge, experience and network they can apply to their job.

Read our latest blog to learn more about the essential role secondments play in ECNO’s business model, and three people’s experiences working with ENCO in this capacity.

Read the Blog

Hello! Mark here, ECNO's new PISO. I'm not that new, but if this is our first time chatting, nice to meet you! Great haircut.

I'm loving the work we're doing around Cyber Hygiene, with emphasis on password hygiene. We're promoting some Cyber Awareness Month staples:

Never reuse a password. Online services can get hacked and customer logins can get on the dark web for criminals to use. By generating and using random and unique passwords, a user can limit the exposure. Criminals will try to use compromised credentials on various internet resources
Do not use company login to sign up for personal business, use your personal email address.
Use dedicated password managers to store passwords and other secrets. One can actually call them “secrets managers” as you can store a variety of personal secrets: passwords, secret questions, PINs, combinations, etc. Some will even let you configure emergency access for the next of kin in case of an emergency. There are good options for free and paid solutions. Some of them can be easily integrated with browsers and offer clients for major Operating Systems.

With the holidays coming up, I want to stress the importance of vigilance around phishing emails. Cybercriminals are very active during festive season. Scrutinize all emails that land in your inbox. Look for obvious clues: unsolicited email, notification of unexpected delivery, password reset hyperlink and any hyperlink for that matter. Hover your mouse over the link or a button disguised as a link to reveal the actual URL where the link is pointing to. Another red flag is an acute sense of urgency one can detect in the email message. Most importantly - don't send anyone you don't know money of any kind. It might be the season of giving, but for criminals, it's always the season of taking!

Wishing you all the best for the upcoming holiday season - I look forward to meeting some of you at the upcoming Annual General Meeting!

Mark

The VASP steering committee and team have been hard at work discussing how to extend the VASP service to support mobile application assessments.

A number of issues have been identified and we are working on prioritizing needs and creating solutions. We hope to be in a position to begin assessing mobile applications in the new year.

The VASP repository/portal system is currently being piloted by three school boards. This web based system offers two types of functionality:

Repository – this will be the interface that school board coordinators use to interact with the VASP service (i.e. submitting applications for review, checking the VASP review status, retrieving completed risk reports), and
Portal - boards may choose to use the portal functionality as a mechanism for publishing their board’s assessments

Work has been done by the VASP team to provide a mechanism to import existing board data into the new system. Feedback from the pilot will be addressed before we make the system available to all boards, ideally in January.

All the best this holiday season!

John