Jan. 21 through 29

This week I was a little busier. I had to report a non-working monitor and hook up a working monitor to the affected computer and I had to remove a virus from another co-worker's computer. I don't know what she does to her computer but it has needed work more than anyone else's. I ran a scan which didn't tell me much, so I did what I do at home... a good old-fashioned system restore. It worked! I also had a teacher who wanted me to email the technology office about installing his textbook CD program on all the computers in the lab. I could install it on every single one but that would take my entire planning period or a LONG time after school. I passed that off to the technology guys because I don't think I have access to allow me to put it on all the computers at once. Any subscribers want to give me any insight into that one?

I also had to inform Ms. Burk about our upcoming project (Engrade - see last week's post). She was less than enthusiastic, but honestly did not seem surprised. She seems to be quite knowledgeable about computers and I'm glad of that. Honestly, I think I only got the job in my building because nobody else wanted it. I know some of the others are more qualified. At the same time, I know a lot of my fellow teachers don't have as much computer experience as I do and I'm glad when I can help them.

Well, I guess that's it for this week. Tomorrow it'll be time to update the weekly announcements and get new information out there. I hope someone got good pics from the basketball homecoming last night. I didn't go (I know - bad teacher!) because... well, I don't want to get all bogged down in the details so let's just say I was sick. If, by chance, you want more details I'll be glad to tell you by email.

Jan. 12 through 20

This week I didn't have a lot of work to do as a tech coach. I learned about an upcoming project, though. Rhiannon Mason, one of our assistant principals, told me that we (Kerrin Burk, my counterpart in the main building, and myself) need to figure out how to get all our teachers on the same page using the Engrade program. Many of us were using Engrade before it was mandated by our former principal, and now that we're all on there, we're overloading Engrade by each having our own system for entering student rosters. Unfortunately, it's not going to help us this 9 weeks, but between now and March we have to figure out how to teach all the teachers to change their rosters over to the preferred system. Oh, and we have to clean out the old one. The former will be fairly easy to do but the latter... I dread it myself. I can't imagine telling the other teachers we'll be cleaning it out during spring break. I can't believe I'll be doing that during spring break. :(

I DID have one computer that was not connecting to the Internet so I went in and jiggled the connection at the box on the wall. Naturally, this worked, making the requesting teacher feel silly. That seems to happen a lot in this position...