<strong>Your Name: </strong>Sara Tamler

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2007/10/27

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

<strong>Total hours for week: </strong>9

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

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Tech general, Helping Teacher, Lab supervision

<strong>Main Report or Narrative: </strong>Ms. Warden is working to get kids generally comfortable with the computer lab right now, so for a good chunk of the week I was helping in the lab, showing kids how to logon and navigate around the website they were on - "Starfall.com" for the younger kids, a learn-to-read website, and "StudyIsland.com" for the older kids, a standardized test prep site.

While I wasn't in the classroom, Ms. Warden had me going to the different classrooms that have computers in them and checking on their functionality. Each room is supposed to have a teacher's computer connected to the internet and a printer, and at least two student computers with internet capabilities. It's been slow work - the computers I've seen so far have been extremely old and slow, and many don't have working internet. There seems to be a problem on a lot of them where they don't recognize either the mouse or the keyboard or both...sometimes the device isn't enabled in the control panel, but sometimes the computer doesn't recognize the plug-and-play driver. The ones that connect via USB cables don't have as many problems as those that connect through the mouse or keyboard port. Haven't been able to figure it out yet.
Also, I've come across a few computers that are connected to a printer but won't register the device. The driver to recognize the printer port wasn't installed, so I went onto the printer manufacturer's website (it's an HP DeskJet 930C) to download the driver. The computer is a Windows 98, and when I tried to download the software for that operating system, I just got this notice saying that HP doesn't supply the software for Windows 98 anymore...out of date or problems with Microsoft viruses or something like that. So either those computers have to be updated, or there's no reason for the printers to be in those rooms...they won't ever be able to work.

The last thing I was working on this week was troubleshooting the laptop carts Wadsworth has...they have 60 new-as-of-last-year Dell laptops, but about a quarter of them haven't been charging. It's absolutely obviously one of the carts' power strip, but we're making sure it's not the chargers or the computers themselves...seems like overkill to both me and Ms. Warden, but her higher-up told her to. The laptops are also being kind of iffy about signing onto the school's network...their wireless is fine, but some of them will come up with script errors about the network...

Good week overall!