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.