Information Technology

TCOE Technology Department supports all types of technical support from WAN/LAN Network design to workstation support. In addition, the IT Team supports many of our county's districts with Student Information Systems, Data Integration, and Cybersecurity.

Help Desk

To submit a help desk request, visit helpdesk.tcoek12.org or send an email to helpdesk@tcoek12.org.

Suggestions to try before submitting a helpdesk request:

Workstation: Reboot your computer. This usually resolves most of the simple issues.
Printers: Familiarize yourself with basic printer options. If it is a network printer, see if others in your district can print to it.
Internet: Check to see if a neighbor or a section of the school is able to access the web, if so reboot your computer, otherwise report the issue to the school.

Training and Support

What makes a good password?

Not less than twleve characters, although passwords can be as many as you want, and considering the advances in "cracking," they really ought to be more like sixteen; use no less than three types of characters (uppercase being a type, lowercase being a second type, numbers being a type and symbols being a type) and not similar to the account name (for example, "jsmith" shouldn't use "Jsmith123456" as the password even though it is twelve characters and of three different types of characters.)

They don’t have to be terribly cryptic and recent research seems to suggest it's better to not be, but that longer passwords are better. Things like "Highway-299!", "Steiner-Flat" or "Plummer-Peak" would work. None of those are super in that they all have a common word and either a simple number or a surname. But they have 12 characters, have 3 or 4 types of characters and would be a lot easier to remember than "9%tG6#)iVt4(3"!

Following the "longer passwords" idea, things like "Boogieboarding-surfing" or "Sixties-moonshots" could be better. They're not common English words (or they're at least compounds of common words) and they're pretty long but not too difficult to type. Mis-spelling one of the words adds more complexity for a password hacking program to get through, so "PineNedles-and-cones" or "RiversAnd-Strems" would be good candidates for passwords.

Another consideration is to NOT use the same password for everything. I've seen it several times now that a person used the same password on his or her email, Facebook and even bank account. Someone guessed or otherwise cracked the email password and caused all sorts of problems for them.

Setting up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is highly recommended even when you're using a good password. With MFA required on an account, an additional verification that you're who you say you are is required to gain access to the account. Very often that's a text sent to your cell phone (though that method is not as secure as it used to be) or a code sent to an application running on your cell phone. When you acknowledge the code sent to your cell phone that proves that, along with knowing the password for the account, you're also in possession of a device associated with the account.