Author: kathleen

I blogged last week about how I had gone 4 weeks without sending a kid to the office.

I am now at 5 weeks.  I honestly doubt that has ever happened in any school year.

Seriously, this has been the coolest school year.  Right now, I’m sitting in my Webmastering class and every kid is on task and doing their assignment.  Okay there are only 9 kids in the class.  I had one who started to argue with me over the restroom rule a couple of weeks ago, and after the second exchange, she’s since stopped even arguing.  She knows she’ll get the pass when the 5 minutes is up, and she’s cool with that.

We only have 3 more days and it will be six weeks, wonder if I will make it.

At least my own — I have gone 4 weeks (and a day), without sending a student to the office.  In fact, I haven’t had to send many to tardy center either.

I made sure all the administrators knew that today, because they were on my case last year because I had a group of frequent flyers — except that I saw them in the office during my planning period too — AND on the disclipine list. 

I haven’t even had an argument with a kid — though I have pulled two out to the hall and read them the riot act for playing instead of working.

My evaluator is in love with a book (I have the title and author around here somewhere), and he insists that you have to display student work.  Well,  don’t see printing programs.

I also brought in a digital photo frame that I picked up at Office Depot for a $70 rebate.  Ativa 3″x5″.  My husband has one I gave him for Chirstmas.

I got the bright idea that it would be really fun to display screen shots of work — but I couldn’t get them to display.

So I finally did an internet search on the picture frame and found out how to do it — you have to open the file with paint and save it with paint.

My next favorite tool (I also list this in order of how much I use).

Ghost is used to take an image of a hard drive.  I use it over the network.

I love it.  I keep as many as 5 working images at any one time.  When I want to do anything more than change one parameter or two on a workstation, I “thaw” it, make the changes, and then take an image.

I may tweak that computer a few times, but once I’m ready to go, then I use my image to install the software to all the other computers.  I usually do about 4 at a time, since we’re sending the bits through the network.  While I am doing 4, I can tweak the 4 previous ones, as you need to reboot the workstation and make sure Windows OS sees all your hardware and change your machine name, otherwise they all end up with the same name.

I really do want to beat my head against a wall.  My evaluator just asked me if I can program.  I told him I wanted to beat my head against a wall.

I got asked what we do in Computer Science by a counselor the other day, too.

I’m not sure how to solve this problem.

The next tool I couldn’t live without is Deep Freeze.  We have the Enterprise Edition and I use it the most.

I don’t have my students shutdown, so they can work bell to bell.  Instead, I use a couple of mouse clicks to shut down the computers are they are leave.

The other thing it does, is make an image of the computer — that way the students can do whatever they want to the computer during the class period, including change the appearance of the desktop and when the computer reboots, it is back in the state I wanted it in.

I can’t tell you how nice that is.  I was away to TCEA several years ago, and I ended up having to uninstall programs off of every computer, they were an absolute mess.

Also, if a computer starts acting up — not uncommon when we’re programming, we often inadvertively cause a memory leak, we just reboot and life is nice again.  Of course, we need to fix that program.

I do have to remember to turn it off when I use the next tool I’m going to write about — Symantec Ghost.

The first tool that I love and can’t live without.

LANSCHOOL!  See http://www.lanschool.com — I have used a version of Lanschool since the day I started teaching in a modern networked lab.  It really really helps keep students on task.

Plus it is much cheaper and easier than dealing with a projector.  I just wish we had bigger monitors so we could do more on the screen at once.

Alfred Thompson checked on the trip for me and the person he got information from said that the trip was too short to do anything productive.  I think I am going to email the organizer and decline, but state I wouldn’t mind doing something like this in the summer and for a longer time period.