Week 16

We started out the day with kids doing Math Blaster, we spent roughly an hour walking about and teaching some of the kids strategies with figuring out the problems. After this, an IT for the district named Alex arrived to teach us how to log on to workgroup manager. To do this we had change the hub and then enter our username and password, allowing us to manage the school accounts on Mac computers. Essentially what we could do was change things such as settings or what appears in the dock for entire grades. Additionally we were given three options on how to manage these computers: Never, once, and always. "Never" meant that that individual teachers could manage the given aspect of their computers independently. "Once" would change the current settings of the computer and then the teacher had free reign until another change was applied. "Always" meant that, even if by some chance someone managed to change a setting we set, the settings would revert when next logged on.



Next we went to the special-ed room next door to make sure the Alphasmarts my mother donated along with the ones already there would work in conjunction with the computer. To do this we first needed to put in a new plug for a keyboard that allowed for a splitter so that both the Alphasmart and the keyboard could be hooked up simultaneously. Immediately we had two problems, the first occurred when one of the Alphasmarts would not turn on normally and if plugged in would turn on temporarily but only allow you to transfer the seventh document to the computer (on Alphasmarts you can have only a few documents, the number varying by model, you press a button to change which document you are accessing). While puzzling at first it soon became apparent that this was simply due to dead batteries which we changed, afterwords it worked flawlessly and was able ot transfer documents to the PC. The other problem was with an Alphasmart Neo which would not try to connect to the computer in any other way than to use infared even when connected by a cable, this we were unable to fix and simply gave up on the Alphasmart in question.

Once this was over the only thing left was for Dede to come in and have her kids work on mathblaster as well.