Khan Academy

Want to home-school yourself? Or just supplement what you’re leaning now in school? Take a look at this!

http://www.khanacademy.org/

Here’s some description/review of it: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/all/1

And here’s the creator of the site talking about it.

Projector Finale

Not really, we have three more to do now, but we did finish up this one here in room 201! Feels nice and secure and it looks clean and fairly professionally installed…if I say so myself… Kudos to Mike R2 and Henry for their work on this, too! Hardest part was actually wrestling the “Little Giant” ladder up the stairs (and back down again) to be able to reach these 14′ ceilings. Second hard part was closing the latch duct that we’d connected to the ceiling.

We also replaced the network cable in room 305. The last one had been wrapped around a hot heater pipe and had actually burned through!

More projector progress

Just a quick update to let you know that Mike R2 & I were able to make some progress on hanging Mrs. Lehman’s projector tonight. We got the plate screwed to the ceiling and the pipe cut to size. Think we have it set so the projector’s at a good angle to avoid glare and provide a good size and brightness. We’re letting the glue dry, so the projector is not up there yet. We also did some work on the computer in the teacher workroom. We discovered that the network switch appears to have gone bad, so we removed it. We also updated the Adobe Flash player.

Next week, I hope to finish off hanging the projector on the ceiling. We’ll need some hooks to hold the power extension cord and we’ll be laying the click-track on the ceiling and wall to hold the VGA cable. Other than that, it’s just tweaking the adjustments to get everything just right.

One item I hoped to get to tonight and didn’t was to check the network connection for the computer in room 305. If you happen to be in the building this week with a little time (and ambition), feel free to wander up there and see if you can troubleshoot. You can give me a call if you need to find a new cable or something.

Hanging projectors

Made some progress tonight towards getting some new projectors hung up on the ceiling for our teachers tonight. Made some decisions and some discoveries that should hopefully allow us to get our first system up next week! The ceilings at Fairview have very interesting composition, so we’re planning to shorten the drop height of the machines to help keep them out of reach and hopefully reduce the weight. Many thanks to Mike, Matthew, and Henry for showing up tonight and making a big contribution in working on this project!

We also got a few more people into the techie Task Freak project tracking system and hope that this will be a good way for us to keep track of what’s going on and to be able to check out what needs to be done when we’re stuck at the school for a 1/2 hour or maybe longer… More info coming on how we’ll continue our info transfer to help you all be as effective as you want to be in helping out the school’s technology programs.

Last note is an update on the website. The FCS PTF Marketing committee has engaged an SEO company to help us make our website more search engine friendly. We’ve had a couple meetings with them and have some action items in place to make a start at being able to be better found by prospective parents/students! Hope to also put more work into tightening up the website itself as a whole and make it more professional and more informative.

Seattle Public Libraries Adds Video Database

Seattle Public Libraries has a new database selection called Access Video. The collection includes documentaries, performance videos, biographies, travel and educational films covering a wide range of topics. Look for content from the BBC, NOVA, Ken Burns, A&E, Bill Moyers, Films for the Humanities, PBS and many others. See a ballet, plan a trip with Rick Steves, go yummy with Julia and Jacques and then watch a biography of Frida Kahlo. Also included in the streaming service are thousands of news reels and clips, many dating from the last century. The collection is fantastic! Each film is “always available,” so no waiting in line and the ticket is free.
You can access the database from the library’s webpage, www.spl.org, under Articles and Research – Databases A to Z. You’ll need your library card number and pin to access it from any computer with web access.

Working in the new year

We’ve gotten together for the past two weeks now and are starting to get rolling again. Spent most of the first week looking through TaskFreak to see if/how we could best use it to track our to do list and evaluating some Wiki’s for info sharing. I sent around login and urls to these tools to everyone on the techie list and hope that you can take some time to try them out and see what you think.

Tonight we took a look at an HP Color LaserJet 4500DN printer that was donated to the school. It is big and HEAVY! It also does not appear to be able to communicate with computers anymore. We were able to get test/config pages to print out and they looked pretty decent. However, after getting the network set up on it, we couldn’t find a printer driver that would communicate with it properly. Used the built in one with Windows first and that didn’t work, then downloaded the recommended driver from the HP support website. No luck there either, it just pushed out blank pages.

Our second project tonight was to get the drive and printer mapping working for teachers who have Windows 7. When we installed those computers a few months ago, we found out that there was a problem with security so the normal login scripts wouldn’t run for the teachers. Tonight we found out that this is because UAC blocks execution of the scripts, if the user logging on has admin privileges! Seems backwards, doesn’t it! Well, that is exactly what was happening. This article was the most helpful and gave us a great script to use to work around the issue. Basically, it checked to see if a user was elevated and block and then created a scheduled task to run the login script instead. Crazy things you have to do to get around security issues sometimes! We modified the script to take an argument so that we could specify which login script to use and so that it created a unique name for the scheduled task, since we run two login scripts, one to map printers, the other to map drives.

Typing

Found a really nice typing program that would be an excellent supplement (maybe even replacement) for Typing Pal today. It’s called Typing Club and you can find it at http://www.typingclub.com. Enjoy!

Getting started again

Many thanks to Kevin R and Mike M for coming tonight, both for the very first time! I appreciate your willingness and interest and I look forward to working with you in the future.

Tonight we worked mainly in the 316 computer lab. Replaced a switch that seems to be going bad, tried to replace a CD drive that kept popping out it’s cd holder (need a new part for this which is now on order), and went through all the student machines to do Windows updates and Aquarius updates (that’s the software we use to automatically turn off the computers at 8pm and turn them on again at 8am to save energy for the school. It also provides additional control for the teachers over the machines.). We also fixed Tabea’s computer (1st & 2nd grade), by removing her corrupted profile, and also installed a computer connected microscope to her computer, donated the the Rochleau-Rice’s.

I’ve found another project management software package called TaskFreak that I’m going to try out to see if we can use it to effectively keep track of our projects and todo items. More on that soon.

Skipping this week…

Both Michael and I (the guys with keys and codes at this point) have conflicting engagements this Monday, so I think we’ll just have to cancel this weeks session.  If anyone is interested in doing a project on their own or wants to organize a little group, just let me know and I’ll be happy to assist.  Also, if anyone’s interested in tackling any of the website projects, just let me know and I can set up a short training session to get you up to speed sometime this week.

Thanks for your interest and I’ll see you again next week!

Kevin

New computers starting to roll out

We had a good group this Monday and were able to get new machines set up for Mr. Adams, Mrs. Ramos, and Mrs. Lehman.  Another one is almost ready to replace the teacher computer in the computer lab.  We also started looking into setting up a new server to host Microsoft Software Update Server to help keep all the computers up to date with Windows and Office updates automatically.