September 19-23

This week we do a lot of problem solving with trying to determine what’s wrong with all the broken SMART boards (SB) in our schools. I have a SB that’s not working so I was involved in the whole process of contact the SB people and figuring out what was wrong with it. The SMART board company didn’t ship the boards directly to our school. We contracted a company to check all the SBs to make sure they were working properly when received from the company and ship them to our schools. If there was equipment lost or broken after the contracted company signed for the order, then SMART board company wouldn’t be responsible. This is why we had to figure out what was wrong instead of just calling and having new boards shipped. 

When you turn my board on, the cursor stays in one place. You can’t drag it around the board. We were told to calibrate the board again. This was not the issue. Since we can’t install or uninstall programs at our schools, the technology office personnel for our district came to check out the board. They thought there might be problems with the software or drivers on my computer. They decided to uninstall and reinstall on my computer and on a second computer. The board still had the same problem when hooked to both computers, so the problem wasn’t with the board.  When looking on my computer, the mouse moved fine and the software worked properly, it just wasn’t showing on the board. This led us to check the USB port. To check if this was the issue, we had to take a working USB port from another SB and replace it on my SB. This also didn’t make it work. Next, we decided to check out the SC9 unit (the touching mechanism). Again, we had to take apart from someone else’s board and try it out on mine.  After trying all these things, we didn’t know anything else to do. One of the technicians that installed the boards over the summer came to look at the board. He discovered the board must have been damaged when it was installed or delivered. If you look at the board in a certain angle in the right lighting, you can barely see where the board was hit. This made perfect sense as to why the cursor wouldn’t move and always stayed at the top of the part. Because of the dent, the SB thinks someone is touching it. That’s the reason why the cursor wouldn’t move from the damaged part. After all that, we finally have a shipment date for my new board. Now I’m just curious to see how long it will take for the people to come install it!  

September 12-16

This week I worked with my school's Educational Technologist (E.T.), Mike, to review some of the job duties that comes with the job. I looked at how he communicates with other E.T.'s in the district about solving technology problems and how he accesses the help requests. Our district has a program called Help Desk. This is where teachers enter information into a computer form about any technology issues they are having (projector won't turn on, password resets, etc.). Most of the time the tech people can fix these issues from their office, but in some cases our E.T. will address the issue. Also, the E.T.s are responsible for the inventory on all technology in the school. He had to get the serial numbers from all the SMART boards and projectors from all the classrooms. I decided to do this task for him. It was pretty interesting because the projectors are mounted to the front of the SMART boards and most of the boards can't be lowered. Since I'm barely 5 feet tall, I had to get a ladder to see the serial numbers. Since the ladder weighed about as much as I do, I got creative and used three egg crates stacked to reach the top. This was much easier than dragging a huge ladder around all the different buildings!

September 5-9

This week I basically discussed this practicum with my school's educational technologist. We got a schedule worked out so I can meet the three hour requirement. Since Monday was a holiday, it was a bit of a crazy week. Last Friday we were informed we would have a technology training on SMART boards sometime this week. Our school was given four subs for the training. We had to come up with a schedule that would allow all 60 teachers to attend training in a two day time frame. I attended the training sessions and assisted our ET. We had to make sure the appropriate software was loaded on all computers and all hardware components were working and set up. I thought the training was great. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and thought it provided a lot of good information.