<strong>Your Name: Emily Watkins</strong>

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2007/11/02

<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> M<strong> </strong> W  F

<strong>Total hours for week: 6</strong>

<strong>The School: Fermi Elementary</strong>

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Tech general, training

<strong>Main Report or Narrative:</strong>

Oh, the humanity! I'm starting to have nightmares about that herd of hulking, derelict monitors, staring eyelessly at me as they lurk on the floor where Fermi's media center should be. This actually isn't a huge deal, since Dr. Sanders hasn't really given me any concrete ideas on what she wants the layout of the media center to be, but it would be nice to see some progress on this project. Due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances (both Dr. Sanders and Mr. Taylor were out all Wednesday morning, so I couldn't access the laptops in the vault <strong>or </strong>the Publisher CD conveniently stashed in Dr. Sanders' office) I spent Monday and Wednesday futzing around with the giant cabinet of computers. Some have Windows 98 (Mitch -- I got your comment about ghosting and will talk to Sarah about it the next time I see her), and almost all of them were stuffed to the brim with every single game produced by Yahoo ever. My favorite computer, though, was probably the one that had 9 different editions of a teacher's resume on it. Apparently, CPS isn't good enough for him -- he was looking for positions as a casting assistant in Florida and a "wine director" somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago (what does that entail? "move that wine over here! no, wait...the southwest corner! look pouty, chardonnay!").  Most importantly, a good number of them are functional, which was generally encouraging.

Friday picked up considerably. I sat in on Shaz's teacher development session on FirstClass so that I can swoop in and save damsels/dudes in e-mail related distress. It seems like a pretty easy program to work with, and there actually might be some neat off-label applications that we can discover and pass on to the teachers (for example, Ms. Stokley was really into using the calendar to make a homework schedule for her kids). I then investigated a printer problem that Mr. Orekoya is having, which started out with "this PDF form is printing faintly" and eventually ended up at "this printer's menus are all in Afrikaans or Finnish or Middle English or something and we should probably reinstall it so I can actually help you". The problem was actually an interestingly difficult-to-fix one: does anyone know how to change the color of the words you fill in on PDF forms? All in all, today was really good -- I got to talk to a lot of teachers I hadn't yet met, and I hopefully can start helping them out more now that they know who I am!