Week 21

We started the day by going to the Kindergarden to reinstall the various programs that had been lost when the computers up to the domain (NUSD.loc if you don't remember). While we were able to get reader rabbit math to work everything else gave us strange errors to deal with. For a while we could not figure out what was going on at first we soon realized that the problem was that the people that had hooked the computers up to the domain had not bothered to authorize the general student login as a power user, as soon as we ammended this everything worked fine.

We then had two volunteer parents take down some hardware to Renew Computers in San Rafael, it was a bunch of items we had no intention of using and in return were receiving several monitors which we would use. As of now the monitors, all of which are CRTs, are sitting in the classroom however we hope to make good use of them soon.

The most time consuming thing we did today was hook up more computers to the domain (can you tell that we do this a lot?). We had to lug each computer to the monitor we were using, plug it in and wait for the computer to recognize the USB mouse, the time it took the computer to do that could be five or more minutes. After this we had to go through the process of hooking the computer up to the domain and adding user permissions. Even once that was all done we had not yet finished, google toolbar had to be installed at which point we would visit Renaissance Learning and download the programs necessary for Accelerated Reader. Those programs were as follows:

Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Reader
Adobe ShockWave Player
QuickTime
Renaissance Place Print Plug-In

With that out of the way all that was left was to finish up with Ms. Stanek's class and then to go on home.

Week 20

The majority of the day was wasted printing out documents for the principle. What I had to do was go through a binder full of star test questions and find out if they had made changes to the rules or added problems. Of course as the binder had not had it's pages replaced for several years I was forced to print and hole punch roughly 250 pieces of paper.

I was also taught how to check students' Accelerated Read reports, it was actually quite simple I had just never had a need to learn this. Log on as an administrator, choose the class, then choose the student. You see their reading level and score for their last test. You are also able to print reports of the students which is what I had to do for Ms. Oluf's class.