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

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2007/10/22

[Week or date reporting about, if not most recent week: 2007/10/15]

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

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

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

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Tech general, teacher help

<strong>Main Report or Narrative:</strong> The week started out strong with the installation of Picasa on Dr. Sanders' and Mr. Taylor's computers. I taught everyone who happened to be in the office at the time how to upload and organize pictures, which should help out a lot when we eventually start working on a school website/newspaper. Dr. Sanders was hugely pleased. I also tested all of the computers in the library for internet connectivity and general functionality. Almost all of them seem to be working pretty well, except for one that seems to want to boot from the CD-ROM.

On Wednesday, I spent most of my time working with Mr. Orekoya. He had a variety of tech requests that took a little while to unravel. Apparently, his monitor had stopped working a few days ago because someone had flipped a little switch in the back of the computer from 115 to 230. I had never heard of this in my life, but when I flipped the switch (in the name of scientific inquiry), the monitor did go off. Now I know! His printer was a little finicky, but I think I fixed that by changing the port to which it was printing. His other complaints were a little harder to take care of. Although I didn't actually witness any problem, he reported that his classroom computers often refuse to connect to the internet. I wasn't sure what the problem was (all of the physical connections were fine, and it worked for me), but I recommended that he just restart the computers when they won't connect. His own computer is also running very slowly, especially at startup. Maybe it needs to be defragmented? Do people even do that any more? I don't know, but I wouldn't mind spending a morning staring at the little boxes as they change colors. It's like Tetris, but without all the work. I also tried to help Ms. Stokley log onto her computer -- her password had been changed by the board, which I didn't really know how to deal with at the time. Fortunately, it seems that Dana did! Phew.

On Friday, I tried to help a teacher whose computer turns off completely after it goes to sleep (changed a few power settings -- hopefully it worked), and bumbled around the computer lab checking all of the computers to make sure that they worked and could connect to the internet. It was a pleasant surprise to find that all but about four work beautifully! Today, no tech requests, so I'm just hanging out in the computer lab and doing my reporting. The keyboard with which I'm typing has a freakishly sticky space bar, so I'll                                                        try to           fix   that. Wish me                                    luck!