August 14, 2014

Today wasn't quite as tedious as yesterday. Shortly after getting to work I went upstairs to install a printer on all of the fourth grade laptops. It didn't take long to figure out all of the laptops in the cart were experience trust issues. I had the teacher put in the trouble ticket because last year we got in trouble for me putting in tickets for other people, because even though I stated the correct person and room, all they looked at was my name apparently. So, the teacher put in the ticket and a few hours later the gruff tech guy showed up to fix them. They have the ability to fix trust relationships remotely this year but apparently not the trust relationship caused by not getting re-imaged over the summer. I don't know if other teachers have tried their laptops yet but I really hope all the laptop carts weren't forgotten. That is really going to piss off that tech dude. He's actually been fairly nice this year but it feels kind of like poking a sleeping lion with a stick.

I finished the last bit of Odyssey work today, adding the kids who I had to transfer, into their classes. There is a new link and login information for Odyssey this year. At least for admins. I guess it is hosted in Texas instead of up here and it will be better for updates. Or something. The problem is that when I logged in today, all it had were the teachers. No students were in evidence. But they're all still over on the old site that I just updated and kids are able to get on without a problem. I don't know if the old stuff will eventually be transferred to the new site or if I'm supposed to manually enter all of the students on the new site. That would be just shy of entirely awful. It would be one thing if it were a less tedious and convoluted interface, but it isn't, so it is ridiculous. I need to ask some people some things and figure out what the deal is.

I got everything updated in Type To Learn. I added the students who weren't in the district, which was pretty easy. The hardest part was moving kids from other schools in the district. When I was doing the transfers in Odyssey I could see what school they came from but I didn't think I would need that information again so I didn't pay much attention to it after I made the transfer request. That meant for each of those students in Type To Learn, I had to open up the student list for each school in the district and search for the kids. That took awhile. I finished it, however. It was also a pretty easy process to change the grade level for each kid. I highlighted all of the sixth graders from last year and deleted them. Then I filtered out all but the fifth graders from last year and then selected all of them and promoted them to sixth grade. The same went for the rest of the grades, filtering and promoting. Thank god I didn't have to go one student at a time. Odyssey could learn a thing or two. After that I moved on to emptying classes from last year and repopulating them with the right kids for this year. For that I could filter by grade and then go through and select all the kids in a particular class and move them all at once.

I was also able to finish editing the reading pages for the resource teacher, which ended up looking like exact copies even though the only thing I didn't change was the picture. I was pretty happy with the outcome. I even had time to edit and print off pictures for one of the third grade teachers.

After the fourth grade laptops were fixed I went back up and installed the printer on all of them. I also installed Type To Learn on three or four of them. My goal was to put it on all of them but it was taking ten to twenty minutes to install on each laptop. It went slightly faster when the laptop was hardwired because the install file was on a network drive. Still not fast enough. I'm going to go back up tomorrow and try to get it on a few more. Possibly even taking a few with my so I can plug them in down in the lab. I even tried putting the giant install file on the desktop of one of the laptops but that did nothing to speed it up. Just added the extra time it took to copy the giant file to the computer.

One of the first grade classes came to the lab today and it was the first time most of them had to log into the computer themselves. I do it for them in Kindergarten and unless they're in Boys & Girls Club, they probably haven't logged in by themselves. And that was obvious. We had to go step-by-step, showing them where 'Ctrl', 'Alt', and 'Del' were on the keyboard and getting them to press them all at the same time. Then typing in their lunch number, which most didn't know. Then how to use a shift key to get a capital letter for the password. Several of them managed to get on but a lot ran out of time before they were able to. I think it went better than last year though. Maybe.

Both Kindergarten classes also came to the lab for the first time today. I remember it going much worse last year. For the most part the kids were well behaved and only a couple kids clicked out of Starfall. I don't mind that so much because it just involves opening the browser back up and going to the website. It becomes more annoying when we move to Odyssey and I have to log the kids back in. But maybe it will be better this year.

I didn't have a visit with the new volunteer kid tonight but we did text a bit. He said he started school today and it went well so that is good. He's on the final stretch, graduating in December, so I hope everything stays on the well path. Sometime soon he needs to register for the ACT again because he missed it last year. I need to look that information up.

With my night, I ate the second half of my Chipotle burrito (delicious) and watched some YouTube videos and a livestream. I also bought the two new textbooks I needed after the instructor changed for one of my classes. Next week I'll send back the one textbook I won't need. I'm saving about $50 sending that back but I also spent over $100 on the two new ones, so that kind of sucks. I went from not quite spending $200 to now spending about $250. I could have bought so many regular books for that kind of money. Instead I have six textbooks to show for it. When I was a kid I always wanted a time machine so I could go back to a time when you could get a huge bag of beef jerky, like pounds of it, for an insignificant amount of money. Now I wish I could go back to a time when college was actually affordable.