Month: March 2009

Okay the real reason I did this, as I am trying out a new feature in Snag It.  The form above is our “ticket” system for technical assistance requests.  This system sucks.  I forget the Room number half the time.

My savior is Snag-it is a really cool program that lets you take screen shots and edit them in really cool ways. I am slowly getting better at it.  It’s from Techsmith and worth every penny, especially at educational pricing.  And it seems they have an output built both for TypePad and for Microsoft OneNote.  I used the TypePad to do this.

Someone on twitter started a #goonline tweet where people are describing when the first went online. I twittered stuff until I realized that I really needed a blog post.

I have been teaching CS for 16 years, so you can probably imagine I’ve been involved in computer for some time.

Since I am a ham radio operator, etc. Most of my computers have been home built.

My first real computer though was a TI-84 computer (real meaning it plugged into the wall, had a monitor, could save data, etc).  Primarily because I was working for TI at the time.  My second was a TI PC, company issued.  That was when I really first went online but only to the company computers.  There wasn’t really any where else to go.

My first real online experience was Prodigy as it had a fixed price.  I couldn’t afford AOL.  Once Prodigy realized they were bleeding money, I left to be online with FIDONet and became a node on FIDONet.  I was pretty active with that group.

I had the second private internet account in the Dallas Fort Worth area with Texas Metronet.  They were the first here that allowed private accounts, not associated with a university or with a business.

Most of my computers have been home built until recent years.  Now I buy refurbished computers at Fryes, usually under $300.  My philosophy now is that cheap and more than one is better.

So nice of the commissioner to allow restroom breaks.  Have they been in the schools and seen what their rulings have done?

Our district and/or school has interpreted the restroom break rule to mean that only one student can be in the restroom at a time or that they have to be escorted by an adult.

On the second floor, the hall monitors kept track — there is a boy’s room and a girl’s room clearly visible to the monitor.  If a student needed to go to the restroom, they stood outside the testing room door until the hall monitor gave them permission to go, and the hall monitored couldn’t if someone was already in the restroom.  By the way, that makes my head hurt.

We have a worse problem on the first floor, we only have two sets of restrooms and 4 sets of halls.  So on the first floor, the students stood with the hall monitor until they were picked up by the restroom monitor.  The restroom monitor would rove the school picking up all of the appropriately sexed students and then stood in the restroom with them while they went.  Of course, no one was allowed to talk.

Right now, with the restrictions we have, we barely have enough adults to go around to supervise students.  We have to have one crew to monitor the test, one crew to relieve the test givers, one crew for hall duty with relievers, and now a crew to do the restroom breaks — which takes at least 4 people.

<sigh>

Maybe I’m naive but I don’t think there is rampant cheating going on.  The only kids who really care are at Exit level.  The rest of the kids don’t care about their results so we really don’t have to worry about them cheating.  I also don’t think the teachers are cheating.  At least not in our building.