Last Day

Well today is my last day at Rancho Elementary (my last day working, I will be back for the staff party). It's been a relatively quick 18 months since I started working here and it's been both fun and extremely educational. When I came to the school I had a basic understanding of technology, though I was a bit more knowledgeable with software than hardware, and I have come out with enough knowledge that I could perform low level IT (such as that at Rancho) with relative ease. I've put together computers, learned how to add them to a doman, and I even learned better ways to troubleshoot than I had known previously.

I've also improved my understanding of how one acts with other people in the workplace. The little hints of whether you should back down or not, the understanding of how much a little help goes to improving your public image, and manners while conversing with colleagues and superiors. Regardless of whatever job I take next this is probably the most important skill I will take away from all this, I've earned the respect of the teachers here and have even earned the favor of some to the point where they went out and bought me cards for my departure from Rancho.

My stay here will probably be one of the most memorable periods of time in my life and definitely one of the most important as I now have valuable life skills that will serve me well for years to come.

Week 32

Well things are finally back to normal though the workload is still bit heavier than normal since the end of the year is drawing near. Today Ms. Dee's class was dressing up as historical figures and pretending to be wax figures that came to life and listed off their accomplishments if a button was pressed in a "live wax museum." I was asked to take pictures of this and ended up with nearly a hundred or so that I uploaded onto the Ms. Dee's computer for her to use.

Afterwards I set up two new dells in her class (after installing word since I had not done anything since the computers were formatted). Because she already had so many computers we needed a power strip, because we no longer had any spares all the IMacs in the lab had to be unplugged to retrieve one. Once she had her computer Ms. Womack needed one as well, at first it seemed as if I would be unable to get it up and running since there were no visible ethernet sockets that were open, then I realized there was one behind a box (I felt a bit idiotic then).

The last activity was one that wasn't really something that ITs are obligated to handle, one of the teacher claimed that you could not hear anything once you picked up the phone. As it turned out the volume of the phone was just very, very low. It's understandable that she did not realize this as most phones do not have a button that allows you to raise and lower volume as you please.

Last Two Weeks (30 & 31)

I suppose I was a bit overwhelmed by covering the work that's supposed to take place over weeks in a couple days so I have not written in my blog for a fair bit, now that things are back to normal I'm going to go back and recount some of the duties performed in the past two weeks.

I had to install OSX on 6 different IMacs and hook up some PC's to the domain one week which took a great deal of time when you consider all the classes coming in and out. The PCs, like the ones from the week before were a mess but I was able to get a few of them up and running with XP Pro.

During the second week there was not so much to do intially so I went around to each classroom asking if anyone had any computer problems. The result was that I spent the day fixing minor problems throughout the school. The most common problem was that someone had changed the default printer of the classrooms and so they were unable to print.

There were also a few computers missing the necessary programs for AR, the reason is still unknown and it's a bit odd as the computers had been able to run AR before. For whatever reason it was nigh impossible to install these programs, simply downloading the compacted version took an absurd amount of time. In the end I went back to the lab, downloaded the programs on a newer computer, placed them on a flash drive, took that to the classrooms, and installed the programs.

Week 29 (late)

Well this is late for a couple reasons, blogger acting buggy, internet going down, etc.

Last Friday was the first day this year where I have been at Rancho alone (so to speak, I am the only IT there but by no means the only person). I took a look at the list of things to do and started by trying to fix four computers, a dell optiplex, a pentium 2, and pentium 3, and and an e-machine (with a pentium 4 processor). To set these all up I had to run an ethernet cord through the ceiling down to a table in the center of the lab.

As it turned out the e-machine was completely fried (when you plugged it in you could smell that there was a problem, I mean that literally). The P2 and P3 would start up and however I could not find a way to get a display on the monitors, I looked up the BIOS beep code and and found that for both of them the video card was either mis-adjusted or not plugged in correctly. The P3 was easy to fix you merely had to adjust the placement of the video card and then tighten the screws to make sure that it would not go out of place. The P2 on the other hand seemed to be warped in some way (indicating a problem with the motherboard). Since fixing the P2 was beyond me and it was a poor computer to start I abandoned it.

As for the Dell Optiplex, I didn't have time to go more in-depth however it appears that the cd-drive is not working properly as OS disks that work fine with other computers are unable to install on it.

Week 28

Well this was my Superior's last day before a three week hiatus (during which I will be working overtime) so we had a bit of work to do. First off we had to change the permissions of a program called fortress that allows us to have administration powers on a normal account by pressing ctrl shift f and then entering a password in a window that pops up. This permanently set the permissions of students so that they were able to move files into their own folders which they needed as they were moving pictures of themselves into their accounts.

We also had to change the shortcut to GIMP that was on the the desktop as it did not allow access to the program on any accounts besides those of administrators. To do this we simply went to the all users folder and then into the the desktop folder therein, we then deleted the GIMP shortcut. We kept that window open and pressed start. went to programs, moused over print, right clicked, pressed copy, and finally pasted the shortcut into the desktop file. To make sure everything was in working order we logged onto rastudent (the general login) to make sure that it worked on all accounts.

Lastly we had two computers that we apparently forgot to upgrade after the summer which had begun to crash. Windows made it so that if you did not have a particular download from them (which we had not gotten since the computers had been off between June and September) the computer would regularly crash when trying to update. We originally believed that we had updated all the computers and that their crashing was due to something else however when we double checked that turned out to not be the case so we went to Windows' website and downloaded the necessary files.

Week 26

Today we decided that after constantly having kids pushing and shoving to get to the printer we would make half the computers print to the other printer in the room. One of the ITs hired by the district told us that all we had to do was to log into said computer as an administrator and delete all printers besides the one we wanted the computers to print to. Unfortunately all this managed to do was make it so that no one else who logged on to the computers would be able to print.

The problem we ran into then was getting the printer on to each account individually; not only would we need to log on to each student from 4th and 5th grade to the computers they sit at (and mind you we don't have a list), start up a program that takes a long time to load, and then go through the tedious process of hooking it up to the printer. Since this wasn't really viable we searched for a way to make all the accounts recognize the printer without us logging on to each one multiple times as varying people; unfortunately the only thing we were able to find was a program for Vista (we run on XP).

Ultimately we decided to wait for information from the people from the district office to contact us, and had the classes that arrived log on as rastudent (the only account that was hooked up to a printer). We had kids playing Type to Learn and Oregon Trail all morning and then had some lunch. Perhaps because today is the last day before spring break no teachers came in after lunch and we had little to do but sit around until it was time to leave.

Week 22

The first half of my morning was spent going around the lab correcting the grammar and spelling of various children, a very tedious task to be sure. Once the children had left Sue Spry asked us for a new computer, so we loaded up a cart with a monitor, computer, and a variety of other odds and ends and rolled it over to the classroom. While doing this we realized that there was a good chance that we would soon run out of ethernet cords, something we had not expected when we made our first order of the things however we are down to just two or three.

Once the computer was set up Sue Spry also told us that she would need Microsoft Word installed on several computers. This was a problem as it would cost several hundred dollars, an expense we are unable to afford at the moment because of the incompetency of the government. However it was soon realized that if we were to simply install Star Office, an opensource word processor, we would allow her to have a word processing program on each computer without spending large amounts of money. While, unfortunately, we did not have enough time to install it today it is something we hope to accomplish next week.

During the last stretch of school miss Levinson came in and had her kids type about what they were passionate about. I went around with her and helped to correct kids' papers. One of them accidentally deleted his text while attempting to change the font and had done so much to try and fix it that simply trying to undo was no longer enough. I volunteered to sit down and type for him, however since the class had so little time left he had to go before it was done, so I finished it up, typed it out, and brought it over to the class. Thus ended my day at Rancho Elementary.

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.

Week 17

Today we did nothing but babysit classes as they came in. Mr. McDonald, Ms. Kuhn, Ms. Spry, Ms. Stanek, and Ms. Kreuzberger all came in with their kids to have them work on projects. The only thing even remotely out of the ordinary came with Ms. Kuhn's class. Her class had not been here before and instead of having them each go to a computer we sat them down and had them look at the projector as we showed sites to them about weather.

It seems that all our work previously has made the demand for our services lessen at times.

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.

Week 15

The first day of school after winter vacation was far less hectic than I had imagined it would be. The first half of the day was spent updating the Macintosh computers around the school. While most updated fine a few computers failed to even finish a search for the desired updates, we had to leave them as they were but it was not a big deal overall. The one unique case was was a computer would only permit the authentication for updates with the user name CTAP. This in itself was not so strange as the fact that it did not accept the designated password for this user name, since I personally am not as well acquainted with certain aspects of Macintosh servers as I should be I was unable to fix it at the time and so saved it for later as well.

After the updates were finished Ms. Ratto's class came in and used Type to Learn, a point of interest is that I had been out of the classroom and one of the students had not been able to log on even with the teacher's help. Despite all his information being correct (from what I had found at least) he had not been able to log on, the problem, as it turned out, was the caps lock had been on and we had just frittered away 10 minutes which made everyone feel a bit foolish.

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.