These 2 months were so packed full of extra things to do that it was hard to start anything new. The Thursday afternoon meeting times wasn’t being utilized by anyone because of our school schedule last quarter. On Thursdays many staff and students devote most of the day to preparing for trips. This takes many forms and bunches of folks are out of the building for the end of the day. They arrived back physically tired and oriented toward other endeavors. So, I tried doing a Friday am tech morning before school. No one came. Several folks said they liked the idea of a techies coffee and how-tos. I thought I might pick up on that time spot in the fall. It may be that, as good as it sounds to some, it just isn’t a time when folks can meet. However, maybe with a fresh start on the new year it will work. -perhaps first Friday of every month and the third Thursday? We will see.

I have had 2 reminders of how useful blogs can be. A student at IHS named Marika Warden is the daughter of one of our staff (Robin Botie). Marika was diagnosed with Leukemia this month and a friend set up a blog to keep people updated as to how she was doing. Her parents could post, the friend who set it up and Marika. It was great to be able to stay up on her news, write her encouraging comments and not bug the family for updates. It was so powerful!! Also Blogs help make communication efficient at year end. Some issues came up the needed everyone’s input. Since Our Principle Joe uses a blog for his weekly letter to the staff, I suggested that he use that format to put out the issue. It worked well. I helped direct people to it from the list serve when that was appropriate. There is the draw back that you don’t know how many people you are reaching who are not responding. In classes that I have taken, we were required to comment. That was useful for that setting but perhaps not appropriate for this.

I keep thinking of more uses for a staff Blackboard site. I think it would be really useful to have a student/ parent directory on line but it can’t be accessible to the public. At LACS we have a parent notification system which we call our flag system. Some folks have thought it would be great to turn our written letter flags into electronic flags. This list could facilitate this and facilitate teachers making email lists for their classes. We’ll see if I can generate some interest and set some things up this summer.

Ah summer!

It seems like all the times are busy times. The Thursday afternoon tech get together got back under way at the beginning of second semester but not a quite like first semester. Teachers are hunkered down into their years. They are more likely to pop in at an odd times to ask for help when something crops up. I completely understand, but I can’t always help then. Some computers got reassigned and I did training or ‘helps’ getting folks up and running on their computers. One is demanding a lot of time. The computer is really old and painfully slow. It just been reconfigured but it really is maddening. The teacher is new to computers and it isn’t a good match. I’ve helped folks get printers connected through the network. For some reason I can’t get the 3 mobile lab computers to print through the network. I can’t figure it out! We got 3 more computers for the mobile lab!! Yeah! up to 6. That is almost really useful for a class- definitely useful as an aid.

Unfortunately– the GPS software, Arcview, did not get put on the new computers. I was told I could install it. I know it was difficult for them. So, I am feeling like I need to do it when I can ask questions and when I have time. Actually, that has me stalled. Looking at my schedule and knowing all the things that come up, I tried to find a weekend not happening. If I don’t get to it before I’ll do it over the summer. I’m really bummed though because that means I will probably scrap the rest of the Arcview part of my Geology class. I started it GPS part and 4 kids made Arc view maps on the 3 computers while the rest of the class did something else. (That was pretty difficult and even with an aide in the class. Kids spent a lot of time waiting for me.) So, the mobile lab is a bit of a frustration at the moment though we (the school) use it all the time.

One techish thing that is going well is our on line evaluations. We do our version of report cards on line. They are written narratives about each student. Teachers write how students have done on assessments, assignments, classwork, group work and other student habits. On the website, each teacher has a page with links to all her classes’ pages. Each of the class pages has links to each student’s evaluation page. There are a number of different selections on the student’s eval page, including several spots for narration. It’s very very cool and the finished product in on line and print form is much more professional than what we used to have! I write all my narration in word and then cut and paste them into the appropriate spot. Lots of us do. Sometimes teachers need help organizing of lists and choices. Mostly, the web format is very straight forward and they are usually pretty independent. It’s usually more a question of who to go to make changes that we teachers can’t make. One frustration with the way the website works is how slow it is to navigate to each kid. And/ or- that you can’t open more than one page at a time. So I use an-add on of Monzilla’s Firefox called Cooliris. Well Cooliris just got better where you can stack a whole bunch of pages. I think it’s very cool! I shared it with the staff. Some of them loved it. My discovery was too last minute for some of them trying to meet our crazy deadline of getting all those report in! I should do a show and tell before end of the year evaluation season!

Rodger came early to a meeting he had with one of our teachers and was sorting out how to use our copier as a scanner. I joined in. I shared the discovery with our new secretary. And I put out on our teacher list to see me for instructions. I got one taker but Emily may have had more. It will be really important as time goes on because most of us would like to have our portfolios be digital. Scanners will be an important record keeping part. One of the things that some teachers don’t realize is that having a digital record of a class or a year or a high school career doesn’t mean being in front of a computer all the time.

I guess the last thing to note is really back to the beginning and connecting with staff. I have tried to get time in our staff meetings for a tech minute. The committee which does the agenda has of course been happy to put me in but there hasn’t been anytime. There are some many pressing issues when you decide things democratically because everyone needs to hear about a number of issues. I did fit one in about how to do a “snoopy” for repair. I asked folks to identify if they have a log in problem. Mostly folks were slow to do that. Jason was really fast to fix the problem as soon as it was identified.

This was a busy time. I took 2 workshops. One an intro to ILife mostly imovie and the other called “Extending the classroom with Blackboard”. Both were really useful. I hadn’t intended to put Ilife into my class right away, though I wanted to be able to help in groups with questions. I created a small movie and learned some of the issues that folks might encounter. I was reminded how powerful Imovie is and I am going to include it in one of my classes for next year. Itunes is something I use occasionally in the classroom. I introduced one teacher to downloading onto an ipod archived versions of an audio program he uses in his classroom. That went well but not without any hitchesJ

The Blackboard workshop was great. I started to create a BB site for one of my class. My goal is to have all of my classes on BB next year. However, I am really hoping for BB to be useful to the staff. This is an idea that Rodger had and I think it is really a powerful one. There are a lot of ways that I think it could be helpful. Sharing files and collaborative work for departments. For my school having a whole staff page will be useful. It will definitely be a shift for folks to utilize it, but if I keep thinking about it and talking about it during this year, I think I can find the places.

I kept up with the Thursday afternoon help times but with the holidays and the end of first semester there wasn’t good attendance. A whole round of getting to SASI from different locations, adding short cuts and adding printers came up again. For some reason, some of the changes that I made about setting up and naming computer for the high school Special Ed room didn’t stay through the nightly shut down cycle. I still haven’t figured out why that is.  I also have to figure out why my ibook doesn’t seem to have enough memory to more then a really short movie, more like a clip.

In November and the end of October, I started a regular meeting for questions about all things computer, aimed mostly for Novices. It really started by one person coming to me saying “I even need help with what the different buttons mean. We meet on Thursday afternoons and it has really been a lot of fun. My goal here is to make a completely save environment. It seems to be working for this one colleague in particular. I hope to expand and be more overt about advertising it spring semester. We have come across some problems which have affected our mini mobile lab. Like how many different ways you can make a computer mute! Or more specifically the long trail of clicks you need to enable the headphone/speaker jack.

I also took a workshop on iLife 11/30 which I’ll write about next entry.

In October, I did a few things which didn’t really come to fruition until later. Folks in special ed wanted to download audio files from the NY Public Library and it wasn’t working. I tried to dope it out. It was odd because as we went through the log in select and download protocols, we couldn’t see what we were missing. I tried it on newer dells and couldn’t get it to work. I did get it to work at home. It wasn’t until the end of November that we finally got to the bottom of it. It was Rodger who knew how to search for a solution. It turns out that it was a hang up in the checking system that the software the library was using. The software is letting you download copyrighted material and so has a protocol to see if you are doing it with legitimate software. When you add that software to your computer, it has a little electronic touch back to windows xp. I think of it as being a little like a cookie. But it most be at least related to the thing that allows your computer to find and know about updates for that program. When you have a district computer, lots of programs get put onto lots of computers in a bunch, called imaging. When that is done, the specific link between the computer and the home company can be (maybe always is) broken. The NY library was checking for everything to be legitimate by looking for these links. The fix was to pitch our copy of Explorer (if I remember right) and re install it.

I am the tech mentor for LACS. It is a small school and we all have pretty easy access to each other individually. That seems to be a good way to start and get to know people needs as I familiar with my job. In September, I helped folks put short cuts on their desktops, mostly SASI but others as well. I helped a few people with email. In general there has been lots of “quick questions mostly asked on the fly. Our schedule already seems to be so on the fly that it all seems to fit and work out.

The adventure begins. The day long workshop is off to a good start.

All LACSers are welcome to email me questions sbrumber@icsd.k12.ny.us