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.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, April 25, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, April 4, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, March 7, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, February 29, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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.
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.
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