Your Name: Katie Schilling

Today’s Date: 2010/10/31

Day(s) worked or described: M W F

Total hours for week: 11

The School: Dumas Technology Academy

Kind of Work: General Security and Software Management

Main Report or Narrative:

I met Ms. Johnson, Mr. Tolbert, and Ms. Allen on Monday and toured the resources at the school (Thanks Sara and Mitch!).  We agreed that the Mac lab was the first priority, since I know how to work with the parental control settings on Macs.

The Mac lab in 312 did not have student accounts, so the students had admin powers on the computers.  The settings and docks were not consistent, and Ms. Johnson said that they were having problems with kids changing the backgrounds.  I made restricted and controlled student accounts, limited teacher accounts, and the techco account on each computer.  Now, the kinds can only access a list of approved programs, and there are some other restrictions as to the admin powers.  Now I hopefully won't find a computer in Icelandic when I go back on Monday.

As I was changing the accounts, I updated the software and installed Comic Life on several computers.  I also found that first class needed to be installed, but I don't have a cps log in, so I can't access the program.  There was a lot of logging in and out of the student account to manage the program displays, etc.  So much typing and waiting...

I talked to Ms. johnson about shutting down the computers to help with speed (shutting down clears the cache), and I'm looking into a program to shut them down for the weekend at least.  I could write a script to do it, but there are several programs available.  I have to see how they feel about having a program like that on their computers.  The energy wasted is a little staggering...  I hope CPS doesn't update over the weekends.  It doesn't seem like they have the same system for Macs as far as updates goes.

I am done with the Mac lab in 312, but I still have 313.  Then, I'm going to clean up the files and programs and generally make the computers more uniform.  That's next week!