Week 14

Today was very typical with not much out of the ordinary happening. Ms. Dee, Ms. Garavante, and Ms. Jones all came in with their classes today, and Ms. Spry sent a few kids to work on their state projects near the end of the day.

The only thing that was new today was the fact that the kids in Ms. Garavante's class were trying to print certificates from Math Blaster, here two possible things could happen. The first was that pressing print button prompted them to save the certificate not print it. The student then had to quit Math Blaster so they could open my documents where they had saved the certificate. The most puzzling thing at first was the fact that the files were saved in a format that caused the icon that is given to things one does not have the proper applications to open. However when you double clicked the icon it opened it as it would a normal jpg, one could then enter the photo printer wizard and print it out. The second thing that could happen made things simpler. A window would pop up with the image in it and one could skip the steps of closing math blaster and opening the image.

Despite the fact that I attempted to give a demonstration I had to help every single person who wanted to print, mercifully it was only a class of twenty and not all of the students needed to print. Beyond that there wasn't really anything of significance.

Week 13

We started out with Ms. Spry's class creating graphs using this site: http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx . It wasn't particularly hard so most of the kids soon had the hang of it. One student's graphs simply would not work and while we are not sure of exactly why it happened we suspect it was because of an old version of Flash. After they created graphs concerning things such as the number of people in certain age ranges in particular states we had them save the graphs so that we could later print them in color.

We also had a young man named Michael come in and he dictated a paper of his to me as I typed it. Along the way I made suggestions such as putting events in chronological order and double checking the facts to make sure they were all correct. After about ten minutes we finished up and that was that.

Before we headed out to lunch a parent named Anita who has been put in charge of moving files from the rastudent account to the student's accounts. The problem was that they could not open the files because they did not have proper permissions. We figured out that saving the files again with a slightly different name applied the proper permissions. I then went and looked up how print screen works so that we would be able to have screen shots of each folder containing files with improper permissions.

When we came back it was time for Ms. Stanek to come in and have her students do research on various spanish missions in California. Some of the kids' browsers could not open the page where you sign in to google so they could not access bookmarks. At first we tried to remedy this by moving them but when that did not work we simply entered the URL manually.

Finally Ms. Kreuzberger came in, it was a largely uneventful class, I found a network driver for an Optiplex gx260 while her kids did accelerated reader and played mathblaster. All in all one of the more eventful days we've had at rancho.

Week 12

Today was a typical day at Rancho, for all it was on a different day of the week than normal. Ms. Robles, Ms. Garavante, Ms. Stanek, and Ms. Rich all came in in to work. Whiles Robles, Garavante, and Rich wanted only games such as Type to Learn and Mathblaster Ms. Stanek was asking her kids to write to homeless children.

Her kids were apparently giving a stuffed animal and a letter to said homeless children; the letter had to be done in the traditional format of a letter which meant many of the children required extensive help. The letter was simple, saying that they were giving the homeless child stuffed animal x and then they would list the things they could do with the stuffed animal to have fun.

After this I visited Ms. Spry's room to set up a new computer as one of the ones she was using was randomly dying. It was a simple matter of plugging it in and making sure all the basic features worked.

Week 11

This week all the kids got off early because of conferences so there wasn't much to do. Once the conferences got started we could not, in good conscience, go into any of the teachers' rooms. However, before they got out we did have time to go to Ms. Ratto's class to do three things:
1. Hookup her Macintosh computers to the domain
2. Show the kids how to start up programs
3. Attempt to get her printer working (which we failed to do)

Once we'd worked at these three things for roughly an hour we had a lunch break and came back in time for the conferences. The remaining portion of the day was devoted to installing a program called "Mosaic Magic" on twenty of the computers. Apparently Ms. Dodge has been asking for this application for roughly five years. Unlike modern programs, and I should note this one was created in 1993, you had to actually copy paste the files from a folder kept on the disc into a new file if you wanted to get it on to the hard drive. After that we had to follow the normal procedure of creating a shortcut and dropping that into the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Desktop file so that the students could access it.

Week 10

I started by learning how to use graph club, a program we had found for the teachers teaching their students about graphs. While the program was good for the most basic parts of graphing you could only graph in the first quadrant and there was no way to compare. You could not, for example, make graphs that showed correlations between two things. While it will be good for the lower classes it does not seem like an overly useful program.

Later, while Ms. Spry was in the lab, Ms. Levinson reported a paper jam. I headed over there expecting to be done in seconds. I removed the jammed paper and tried to help her print again. However it refused to print, we waited for about twenty minutes as she said it was normal, then we restarted the computer and went to lunch, when we got back it had successfully printed.

As always we ended with Stanek's and Kreuzberger's classes. Stanek wanted them to take a template, save it to their My Documents file then fill it out. With a little help on the title and making sure everything was the right size they were soon all done. However we had to go around to them all to print as printing was defaulting to Microsoft Office Document Image Writer which did not in fact print. Then Kreuzberger came and had her kids work on mathblaster for a bit before school ended.

Week 9

Today I learned how to add macs, as opposed to PCs, to the domain. The naming syntax was the same however one also had to do things like note who was able to access the computer now that it was part of the network with the syntax NUSD\(School intials)_(group) an example being NUSD\RES_Teachers etc. You also had to make sure that the computer knew the LDAP connection went to hub.nusd.loc.

We also figured out how the kids have been muting the sound on their computers depise not having the privelages to do so. On the upper right part of the keyboard as an inconspicuous button that has a speaker with an x through it that toggles mute. Previously we had thought we had to exit the program, enter a program called fortress that gave us full privelages on a non-privelaged account and unmute the speakers. Now we know we can simply press this button in order to return sound to them.

Not much else happened, I delivered some AR reports to classrooms and taught Mrs. Jones's students how to acess AR by themselves and helped the kids when Ms. Kreuzberger's class took their first AR tests in the lab.

Week 8

I spent the entirety of today installing a new version of Report Card Maker on the computers of the teachers at Rancho. For the windows users it was ease itself to do it, all you had to do was go to control panel, add/remove programs and remove the old version. Visit their website, download and press run. After that all you had to do was identify your state and district, then click "get" to retrieve a list of this year's students for the teacher. That was all there was to it.

The Macs, while not comlpicated were far more tedious and time consuming. You had to move all taces of the old application to the trash and rename the RCM (Report Card Maker) folder. Then you went and downloaded the mac version at which point you had to unzip the file, which took time, then install it in the ridiculous manner of dragging one oversized file into another. After that you had to create shortcuts on the teacher's desktop for him or her to find, all in all, the process was several times longer than the one for windows.

When finished I came back to the lab where we had one class before departing.

Week 7

First we helped Ms. Kreuzberger set up a new computer. The problem originally was there were too many files to transfer them via a Flash Drive. So we changed the domain from NUSD.LOC to WORKGROUP on both computers. This allowed them to share files so we placed the files from the old computer onto shared, put them on the new computer, then hooked up the latter in her from. By doing this we did not only give a teacher a new computer we made sure that everyone in the school is running on the same OS, specifically Windows XP.

Soon after Mr. McDonald came in for a class where his kids did Accelerated Reader. Soon Ms. Stanek came asking us to help with her E-Mail. Apparently no matter what she did it ordered it oldest to newest which was greatly inconveniencing her. It turned out she had accidentally clicked a button that changed the order and she had not realized yet that it was a button as it appeared to be just saying what was in the column.

I then learned how to switch out a hard drive, which I don't know why I never bothered to learn earlier as it is ridiculously easy. All that is necessary is to slide it out and then plug in a few wires in the back. After that I installed XP however we then had a string of classes cutting out time short.

Week 6

We started out giving Ms. Kuhn a new computer. Unfortunately whoever had originally reformatted the computer had forgoten to install the ethernet driver so we could not get onto the net or hook up to NUSD.LOC so we had to go get a disc and install the necessary driver. Then we used the RES-XXX-YYYYY syntax.

After this we logged into to all the students whos accounts had been activated in Ms. Levinson's class to put a shortcut to a page about geological formations. It was rather cumbersome as we had to log onto the each individual student on their assigned computer, log them into google, then drag the URL bar onto the desktop.

The last things we did was set up a computer for resource whos computers are woefully outdated. Besides all this we helped several classes, second graders learning Microsoft Word and 5th graders using accelerated reader etc.

Week 5

Most of the day was spent hooking up new computers to the network. We named the computers RES-(insert room number)-PTA so they could easily be identfied and connected them to NUSD.LOC so they could be controlled by administrators. For some reason the renaming did not allow us to become admins meaning no new software could be installed, luckily I found that by logging in as admin on the computer and not NUSD.LOC we could install things and it would not be an issue.

Later that day we had a tech meeting, the second I have ever attended since I began working there last year. Tensions were a bit high as the teachers were now realizing that by cutting the tech budget there was not enough time for an IT to keep everything running as smoothly as people wanted. Then there was the matter of schedules as everyone wanted to bring their class to the lab when an IT was there. Sadly we had to cut the meeting short as the fire department came to make sure everything was up and running via testing (hint: it is hard to have a meeting with loud sounds blaring).

Week 4

I went around putting Accelerated Reader (AR) onto all of the various computers in the school. I then retrieved a disk containing the program for creating report cards for Ms. Dodge who recently obtained a new computer. Later we had two different classes come in, one desiring to use a site to teach students about American history and the other using AR for testing purposes.

Week 3

Was not able to work.

Week 2

We removed Qlipmedia from the startup folder as it was causing slowdown during start up and the red grid that appeared when right clicking might panick the younger children. Additionally we had our first bunch of students come in, Ms. Spry's class. I was then tasked with updating the Macintosh computers of the first grade teachers and was also told to set up Ms. Thornton's new computer, which included installing the driver for her printer. Since it had already been hooked up to the school network once it was able to work however I found that no one at the school is able to rename computers (renaming computers is a neww skill for me, I only just learned the syntax for it: XXX-RYYY-SN). So we are attempting to get permissions for possible future cases where we have to rename computers.

Week 1

This week has been pretty non-eventful as most teachers are getting the students settled in. We reinstalled a few programs that were not working correctly such as Opac on the library machines along with a new program called Qlipboard on the computers in the computer lab. The reason for the latter is that the teachers have begun to think about podcasts and this is an easy and free program for doing this. The only problem is it requires a different screen resolution than the one we are set to which may break some of the old programs. On top of all this we repaired Ms. Dodge's OS since it had been acting very slowly.