August 28, 2015

Today I experienced a moment of genius. I'm not afraid to say it. I impressed myself.

The printer issue was only getting worse this morning. We were up to at least six printers showing as offline and people were unable to print to them. I think those six printers accounted for all of the color all but maybe one or two of the color printers in the building. So it was kind of a big deal but of no real concern to the tech people, even though they caused the issue when the rebooted everything earlier in the week. Several of the teachers weren't able to print at all because they didn't have any printers added to their computers that were actually working. I was down to just the copier because the black and white printer in the lab was also showing up as offline for me. This led me to a lot of thinking.

The printer in the library was working yesterday but one of the first grade teachers said she wasn't able to print to it today. I went back to my computer and added the library printer (by picking it out of the list of printers) to see if it was also offline for me, and it was. Then I saw on my devices and printers page that I had a printer called 'Library'. The only time a printer doesn't have the annoying network name is when it is manually added using an IP address. This printer wasn't grayed out like the library printer I just added, so in theory it should be working.

While I was thinking about that the color printer in the lab kicked on and some papers shot out. A short time later one of the third grade teachers came in and said that she was finally able to print using the other computer in her room. That information got the gears turning even more.

I went through the steps to manually add the color printer in the lab using the IP address. The icon for it showed up looking just fine while the icon for the same printer that had been added by picking it out of a list, was still grayed out and offline. Then I tried printing one of the labels that I made for one of the first grade teachers yesterday, and it worked. Eureka.

I went down to the library and manually added the library printer onto the librarians laptop and we were able to print to it. I told one of the fifth grade teachers about it and after adding her printer in the same way she was able to print the quizzes for her class. Before heading back to the lab I manually added printers on the kindergarten teachers' computers.

When I got back to the lab I went through the steps of adding a printer using an IP address and took screenshots as I went. I then highlighted the important areas in each picture and created a quick PDF tutorial of how to do it and sent it out to the school so anyone else experiencing the offline printer issue could hopefully fix it. At least two people responded that it worked for them.

One of the keys to figuring it out was the fact that the third grade teacher had been able to print from the other computer. Last year I had to add printers to that computer using IP addresses. And the printers I had done that to on my computer were also still showing as being online. I have no idea why it works but it does and people are able to print again without having to wait on the tech guys to come out. Fingers crossed everything is still working next week.

After making the tutorial I printed out the rest of the labels and cut them apart. I had only been able to find full-sheet label label, not sheets with the labels already lined up, so I had to cut all of them out. Possibly for the best because I wasn't entirely sure that the labels I made would line up with the ones laid out on a sheet.

Not too long after finishing that I went down to one of the third grade classrooms so I could take pictures of all of the kids. The teacher wanted to make profile pictures that she could print out so I did a bit of editing and turned them all into 4”x3” photos. I also made a sub chart for her that had a smaller picture and the name of all the kids that she can leave for a substitute if she ever has one.

All of this was accomplished before lunch, even with a couple classes in the lab. After lunch the third graders from yesterday came back to finish their poems. Then I had a second grade class followed by a fifth grade class. In the fifth grade class I ended up having to add a couple kids to Type to Learn 4 because I didn't have them on my original roster. One of the students is the older brother of the kid in second grade who only speaks Spanish. Coincidentally, the older brother also only speaks Spanish. The teacher asked me if there was a Spanish option in Type to Learn 4 and I had no idea. I did a quick search and it seemed that there was so I clicked around the menus and found the option. All the typing stuff is still the same but when you hover the mouse over the instructions or anything else in English, a window pops up with the Spanish translation. Pretty cool.

I also got a Bluetooth keyboard to pair with the resource teacher's iPad. It was being a pain but after deleting it and starting over it fell in line. Tough love.

While working on printer stuff I was talking to the librarian and one of the topics was student interns, who we don't have this year. She didn't like this before but today she learned that one of the para's daughters, who is a first year teacher in a nearby town, got an intern because the university was desperate to find placements. This made the librarian even more upset. She assumes that somehow we did something wrong and are being punished for it. Are school is filled with teachers who have been teaching longer than I've been alive. Teachers brimming with valuable experiences that they could be passing on to interns. Yet a first year teacher ends up with an intern. Is there even a point to that? It doesn't matter if that first year teacher is the best thing to happen to teaching since the beginning of teaching, she's still a first year teacher, and at this point really doesn't have any more experience than her intern. If I was that intern I would feel completely gypped. It really doesn't make any sense.

Tonight for dinner I had the second half of my sad Chipotle burrito. It was just as tiny as the first half had been. It had the proportions of something you would by at Taco Bell, not Chipotle. Hopefully the next time I get that girl she won't be as timid at laying out the ingredients.

Tonight I had a long conversation on the phone with one of my friends, watched a bunch of YouTube videos, and replied to a discussion post in two of my classes. Not a bad night. And overall, today was incredibly productive. I accomplished so many things. It would be nice if I could do this everyday.

Tomorrow I am going to sleep in, hopefully, and then do things. I still need to read for stuff for my classes and reply to more discussion posts. We'll see if I get around to any of that.