<strong>Your Name: </strong>Tommy Butterfoss<strong></strong>

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2008/12/1

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

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

<strong>The School: </strong>Canter<em></em>

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

<strong>Main Report or Narrative: </strong>There were a few "broken" computers, as always. I managed to fix them all without too much difficulty. The students seem to have recently discovered a love of theft- they've been taking the balls out of mice and even ripping the numbers off of the computers. That I truly do not understand. Who wants a little sticker that says "21" on it? Anyhow. The donated computers are done, although only about 4 of them work. I also helped students work on their wikispaces. Some of them have gone way beyond just writing their autobiography and are finding icons and animated gifs and flaming text from other websites to put on their pages. They (luckily) still haven't figured out that since they're logging into the same account, they can edit each others' pages. It will be chaos when that happens.

I also started distributing printers on Tuesday. I felt a little stupid explaining to teachers that the printers wouldn't actually work until the cords were ordered, but I was supposed to put them in the rooms anyway. One teacher actually didn't even have a computer in her room yet-she said she had talked to Ms. Banks and Dr. Conlan about it. I delivered most (if not all) of the printers in the lab, but there are still some in the storage closet. I'll probably finish that up and see if that teacher still needs a computer next week.

Random thought of the week: The students always seem to hijack projects and take them in their own direction, which is partly the wonderful thing about technology, and partly just annoying. On the one hand, it's heartening to think that these kids are independently figuring out how to use technology for their own purposes. On the other, sometimes I wish they would just do their work (I guess that's why Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both dropped out of college). For example, when they were supposed to make wikis, they discovered the messaging feature on wikispaces and spent the rest of class sending emails to each other. When they were supposed to be researching poets, one found the site for magnetic poetry where you can do "virtual magnetic poetry" and move words around, so then they all started writing their own poems with it. (I did not read any of them, although judging by the giggles I'm guessing the virtual magnet words aren't all rated PG). It's pretty interesting for me to sit in the corner and watch this spread from the one who discovers it to the whole class-it seems to happen almost instantaneously. Anyway. Hopefully they'll put this creativity into an assigned project at some point.

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