Hello extension!
I'm a systems administrator in Florida supporting our research, teaching, and extension programs. In addition to my regular "sysadmin" duties I've found that I really love teaching our extension agents about the "cloud". Together with my co-worker Joe Gasper we've been holding monthly training sessions for just over three years. In that time much of our university has learned the power of the cloud and ways to use new tools that make your digital life a little bit easier.
Our passion for extension has led us to a new destination in the cloud…. I’m happy to announce Cloudy County Extension. This new training platform is purpose built for extension. In Cloudy County you’ll find a community of agents that are looking to harness the power of the cloud. We’re hosting free monthly training sessions and digging into all the nooks and crannies of the Office 365 cloud. In addition to free monthly training sessions, we’ve created a community in Microsoft Teams that allows you to interact with us and other agents asynchronously throughout the month.
Alongside these efforts we are also pushing for big tech companies like Microsoft to recognize extension as its own sector. Since extension blurs the lines of education, government, and business it has been hard to define by corporations like Microsoft. We all know that extension doesn’t fit in a single category. As educators you’re transforming the public, but because your students aren’t in a traditional classroom or in a gradebook you often get overlooked. I’m proud to say that we’ve been making progress and just recently Microsoft sponsored the 2022 NACAA annual meeting. In the 107-year history of NACAA this was the first time a tech company had ever been present! Not only did they come, they were also major monetary sponsors of the event and provided all of the laptops used to deliver presentations by agents!
Joe and I are happy to be a part of this journey with you into the cloud. I really hope to see you in Cloudy County Extension for our next community call. Nearly 300 of your peers have already joined us to learn more about the cloud!
If you’re interested in joining us, you can sign up here: https://aka.ms/joincloudycounty
You can also find all of our previous community calls on our YouTube playlist if you'd like to catch up!
Keep it cloudy!
Dewayne and Joe
AKA: The #ShiftShow
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