going back to the missing weeks - Feb. 20 through 27

This week was really sort of boring.  I did have two issues and one was my own.  I really do not like the printer in my classroom (it went on to cause more problems later in the semester).  This week I tried to install the driver on my laptop but they were incompatible.

I also needed to hook up the Elmo document camera to my neighbor's computer.  You see, she and I have to share our Elmo, which brings all kinds of headaches.  She is 5 years younger than me, but not quite as tech-savvy as I am.  (In turn, I am really not as good of a teacher as she is!!!)  It seems that every time I borrow the Elmo or she has a guest speaker, nothing really gets set back the way it's supposed to.  I try to set the Elmo up right but I usually end up having to go back to her classroom to fix something and that week I had to do just that.

going back to the missing weeks - Feb. 12 through 18

Yes, these are way out of order...  I had to look back to see what weeks I hadn't posted anything and fix those.

For the week of February 12, I only had one work order on my list - to fix a printer in a math teacher's classroom.  Now, this teacher is sort of an exception to the rule in my school.  She's at least 10 years older than me (which doesn't make her the exception) and knows what she is doing with a computer (which, when combined with that first fact, DOES make her an exception).  So, she wanted to breathe over my shoulder while I re-installed the software to make her printer and her computer communicate.

What had actually happened was that she did something to the printer's door, so that it will now work if she holds it down.  She seemed perfectly happy with this solution.  I let it go at that.

April 16 through 22

Well, I missed a week there because I was working on a paper in another class. This week I'm going to go back to the log and post for the weeks I missed. This week I didn't have a lot to do as tech coach. Monday through Wednesday I was with the HOSA kids at Opryland Hotel. I did have a printer issue - mine! I'm going to work on that this coming week. I'm still working on the grading program problem and I had to do a lot of grading myself this week. Not much else to tell... Oh, yes, one more thing. I have a new position at our school. I am now also a data coach, helping the administration manage the massive amounts of data we have to deal with. That's one more thing to do, but hey... I signed up for it.

April 2 through 6

Yes, it was a short week, made even shorter for me by my trip to take my son (age 17) to the college of his choice, TTU. Well, at least it is a TBR school, I can't complain about that. He wants to go into mechanical engineering, so I can't fault him for choosing Tech. It was originally my first choice but I chose APSU because they gave me a much better scholarship offer. At the time, I was thinking about going to pharmacy school, at the time I thought I was just going to go there for 2 years, so I decided to go to APSU since it was cheaper. Then I changed my major to something I could finish at The Peay. The rest is history.

But that's just a little side note...

I spent plenty of time working on the gradebook program project. I see light at the end of the tunnel, but it's not finished yet. Maybe I'll have it done by graduation.

Otherwise, I spent time answering questions about the gradebook program and I'm supposed to install someone's printer - guess I'll do that tomorrow.

March 26 through 30

I need to go back to my tech coach work log to write the details from the last few weeks. This past week, however, is easy to remember.

I have had the tech coach project from you-know-where.

About two months ago - I can't tell you exactly when because this semester has been strange like the weather - an assistant principal, Ms. M, walked up to me and said, "I need you for a project." Many of the teachers in our school have used a free online gradebook program for several years. Last year the principal at the time, Mr. H, began requiring all teachers to use it, and earlier this year, Coach B, our graduation coach, wanted us to use it as a school so that he could have access to the students' grades to help those who were in trouble.

The powers-that-be of the online gradebook contacted Ms. M and said, "Your school is killing us!"

It seems that their online roster for our school was about 5500 students long. We had 1061 enrolled. We have about 90 teachers, give or take a couple, and few of them were using the preferred method of using the student ID number as the ID number in the program. I myself didn't use that method last year, but this year I started using it because I discovered that my numbers were the same as some of the other teachers and kids were getting grades for other students!!! The problem with this is that some students had seven or eight ID numbers in the roster. Some only had one or two. Ideally, we could've started this over the summer but that didn't work for the gradebook people. They wanted us to go in and do it for the 4th grading period. The cut off for the 3rd grading period came after spring break. I had to get access to become an admin on the account, then, because some teachers couldn't wait to get their grades in (meanwhile I haven't got ANY in there, a fact I need to remedy before Tuesday), instead of deleting everybody in the program... well, let's just say this. It's a project and I'm learning as I go. It's going faster now but I'm still having to go student-by-student through the 3000 or so names that are in there to merge files.

I just told the teachers how to create their rosters (it wasn't the way I had done it in the past); then I went in and deleted students that I knew had graduated or at least not attended this school year; then I went in and merged files for students by changing their ID numbers. The roster still didn't look right. THIS weekend I learned a trick I wish I'd known at first - I could delete every grading period prior to this year and that would make weeding out the data a lot easier. Now the roster only has about 3000 names which is nice. We still don't have all the teachers on the school site (I predict I'll be teaching this at the first-day-back-before-we-get-students inservice, IF I'm still teaching at that point - I don't know why I wouldn't be, but my life's been so uncertain these last few years, I don't want to assume too much!) but honestly, that is not hurting matters for me right now. I worked about 20 hours in two days doing all this stuff. AND teaching too. AND fixing minor computer issues. AND planning a blood drive.

I also worked on mopping up the grading program issues this weekend. Hopefully tomorrow night I can get all my grades in, and then I won't feel so bad working on the computer stuff.

I have another class too and I've really dropped the ball in it. I've changed my mind on my topic for research three times. I have two weeks to do the research AND write the paper. It does not look good. The good news is that I've done everything else in the course on time, I think, and the prof likes my work, and I think I know what I'm doing now, and... well, that is another class, and not really related to this blog. Ahem.

Let's see... without my log in front of me I can't remember what else I did this week... the gradebook program project has certainly kept me busy, but I had a couple of other issues.

Oh! I remember. I installed Flash on two laptops for Ms. T on the opposite end of the building, tried to fix a corrupted Publisher file for Ms. A.M. on our side of the building... did Ms. W need anything this week? She always needs something, but she got me the week before mostly. I can't think of anything else but I wrote down what I did. Seems like I had to install some programs for Mr. W but that may have been last week, too.

AND... last but not least... I had an observation sometime in the last week or so. I did so-so. I have two or three more. I HATE this new observation/evaluation process.

What made me think I could handle grad school, teaching full-time, attempting (and failing) to run a household well (fortunately, my husband is VERY understanding), typing transcription part-time, being good to my nearly-grown kids, my husband, and my parents, and being active in my church? I don't know. And, one of the cats ran away. I promise, I do feed and water them. The scary part is, I'm actually considering going on to get my doctorate. Am I crazy??? Believe it or not, I'm NOT planning to take any classes in the summer this year. I've got other plans in the works... but again, I digress.

This'll be a short week and THANK GOD. I have never appreciated Good Friday so much...

OMG! Week of 3/2 through 3/9

OMG! I didn't realize I hadn't published since Feb. 11! I will have to go back and see what I did those two weeks. This coming week is Spring Break, but I'll be working on a project that week. I had a slow week until the very end as far as tech coaching goes. I did have to go and look at someone's computer early in the week (or maybe that was last week - I'll have to look at my log, which is at school). I had to crawl around on the floor in another teacher's room looking for wiring to figure out why her projector and her computer weren't communicating. Then there was Friday. Yes, I needed to be grading writing journals so I'd know exactly what pre-exam grades would be... but I had to install iTunes on another teacher's computer (that was easy), fix someone's printer (this would be the one down the hall whose computer has had major issues, but I think she'd done it all because when I got there I hit "print" and it worked fine), and re-install someone's test bank, which didn't take long either. I graded journals until 5:00 pm and then graded exams until time to meet my family for dinner at 6. After I got home around 9, I graded until about 11:30, but I'm on Spring Break now. The project... eh, it can wait until Monday.

Feb. 4 - 11

This week I was a little busier than previous weeks. I had to work on the printers in one teacher's room. She has two. One was so easy to fix, I wasn't really sure she was having problems with it. (She confirmed that she had been, though.) The other was not so easy and I recommended replacing it, or at least sending someone who knows more about it than I do. I had to hook up someone's laptop to her projector (I know, it sounds very simple... and this wasn't a computer novice, either. She was just having some problems with too many devices connected to the box, I think). I had to install Dropbox for someone, too, and to download another program to the previous teacher's desktop. She could've done that, but I'm the only one on that end of the building with clearance to do that. The biggest problem we have at our school is that the wireless networks are down so much. I had another teacher whose computer didn't want to connect to my wireless. I reset my router and voila! She was back on. Still a fairly uneventful week as tech coaching goes. Now I just have to figure out what to do about this grade program situation project...