With the new school year, with some new faces, and more that are familiar, so goes technology.  Much of what we had in place in terms of equipment, and setup has remaned the same, but technology, and time marches on.   This post should act to kick some of the dust off of this blog, and address the push here at Carrington Middle School, to have current and pertinent team webpages for all of the academic teams at our school.  Today’s WordPress session will address this goal, and explore WordPress as a tool and vector towards that end.  We’ll be using this link for tutorials DPS EdTech WordPress and Joomla

There are an additional 14 or so templates available now when you select the “presentation” tab.   If you do not see them from your administrative page let me know, and we’ll see about getting your account updated.

As you’ve probably learned through the grapevine, Randy, Paula, and Nancy have been processing and bar-coding ActivSlates for distribution for the classroom techno-gluttons..  If you been waiting for one come check and see if more are ready to checkout and then check one out, and check out what you can do with it.  Sorry, went a little checkers there.

If you’ve got one and need a hand in setting it up let me know.

We’re trying to get some resolution on the cursed Optiplex GX280 workstations, both in Carrington, and district wide.  I’ve a few machines that jump to the head of the problematic computer list, but if you’ve a real lemon, one that you’re pretty sure has had more hands in it than the Halloween candy bowl, drop me a line, and we’ll send it in to the powers that be.  Rumor has it that if they’ve seen one more than 3 times then we are due a replacement.  We’ve seen only 2 replacements, but we’ve seen a parade of contract repairmen.  Right now the verdict is still out, as to whether or not your tech person is spot on, or off the mark as to the severity of the 280 plague.  This is your ringer’s chance to shine. Let that jet engine CPU fan launch for the great beyond–on a highway to dell in a hand-basket and not back!

Do you have a Dell GX280 warming your room?  If you’ve a machine that crashes/locks up, or makes loud airplane jet engine noises please let me know.  Better still, go ahead and tell me what it is doing in an email and include the service tag #. 

What, where’s the service tag?  On the Dell Optiplex GX280 (that’s written in gray around the power button) you can find the service tag behind the gray front flip door, or on a bar-code (easier to read) that should be tape to a back corner of the machine..  These beasts will not be under warranty forever, so if they’re messing up, lets get them the Dell out here to fix them.

Believe it or not, our network and connectivity is improving, things are getting better. The pre-progress report network crisis, should be resolved. This was a temporary though untimely and aggravating setback.  There was a configuration issue on one of our switches, and it happened to be the switch that our server was attached to.  This resulted in several applications which required the server, to be incredibly slow.  Printer cues, IGPRO, and SIMS to share the pain.

But beyond that hopefully being resolved, there are tangible, and hopefully noticeable improvements. We have now had our bandwidth increased by 2.5X.  We went from 10MB/sec data transmission, to what the high schools have (25MB/sec).  Downloads, updates, log-ins, email, and other actions should now move more quickly (knock on wood).

These are the folks we are trying to get setup for the second wave of teacher web pages (blogs)

Carrington WordPress Pages (Second Group):

Katie Altenhof, Carmen Lemmons, Stephanie H Johnson, Stephanie Johnson (Stephanie E. Johnson)

Kathleen Day, Kimberly Coleman, Joan Stubbs, Margaret Clark, Alicia Jones. Michael Brandon

Latasha Cozart, Carrie Jacobsohn. Eugene Moore, Adrienne Cooper, Matthew Dickerson

Jill Molloy, Cynthia Ferebee, Christine Morgan, Kathy Hickey, Carey Eaton, Amanda Presson

Carrie Jacobsohn, Sherai Jones, Renita Leak, Julie Spencer, Kecia Rogers, Steven Nowicki

Holly Emanuel

Activeboard Users,

We are seeing a variety of issues with the ActiveStudio Software and hardware.

The support folks at Promethean suggest that we update the driver.  The machines I’ve looked at are running ActiveDriver 4.1.8  

The link below is to the updated 4.1.10

http://www.prometheanworld.com/us/server/show/nav.2290

Click on it, save it, but most importantly  run/ install it!

Hopefully this will improve things and alleviate some of the problems.

We’ve setup our first run of teacher web pages in WordPress, and are preparing for the second wave of another 20 plus accounts here at Carrington Middle School.

WordPress is our new vector for teacher web-pages.  Setup as a blog,  WordPress will also provide a means for teachers and academic teams to present information that is both static (team policies) as well as information that is more immediate (homework assignments, projects).