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.