-tictech message:
(forwarded with permission - thanks, Joe - ma)
-----Original Message-----
From: Weatherby, Joe [mailto:jmweatherby@seattleschools.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 8:35 AM
To: Ahlness, Mark
Subject: RE: tictech: news so far...
Mark,
My name is Joe Weatherby and I run the computer lab and technical
support here at Madison Middle School. I read your e-mail and thought I
would answer your question as to what is happening in another school.
Here at Madison we have on class-sized computer lab and a half-sized
group of computers in Library. Several classrooms have groups of 4 or 8
computers and most of them are wired to the WAN. The building is
all-concrete (scheduled for demolition/remodel next year!) and has
prompted some creative wiring solutions:). We run student accounts out
of a NT 4.0 server by classroom, which has worked well for us so far.
Students log on with the room number that they want to do work for and
"My Documents" pops up with a list of period folders for that room.
This could mean that a student could get into a room account and easily
erase everything if they wanted. Thankfully, this has not happed in the
last two years, though I do worry about it. We do run a backup, but I
would hate to use it and loose a whole day of student work. I have a
user policy set up on the server, which locks down the win98 computers
whenever the students log on while allowing teachers to have access to
administer their desktops. I am still "feeling" my way through user
accounts but am learning more every day.
We use a program called PCRdist to re-image computers that get out of
whack. It can only be used on a group of computers with exactly the
same hardware (i.e. that bunch of Dells you had the issues with).
PCRdist works well when it works but has been a huge headache at times.
After a whole year, I finally learned figured out how to circumvent it's
idiosyncrasies and get it to work right. I'm not sure if I would advise
PCRdist to anyone because I get some strange and random errors with the
win98 OS' now. Usually 2 or 3 out of every 30 computers will pull an
error each period. This could be a function of PCRdist or it could be
due to the fact that I had to reinstall the OS' on all the Dells.
PCRdist does NOT work well with the custom factory image that Dell pumps
out on the Gx-150's.
Well, that is the main stuff that we do. I hope it can be useful to
you.
Joe Weatherby
Madison Middle School
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Ahlness [mailto:mlahlness@seattleschools.org]
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2002 7:44 PM
To: tictech
Subject: tictech: news so far...
-tictech message:
Thought I'd take a few minutes and share what's happening in technology
at
our school so far this year.
(cut - ma)
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