Seriously, I have got to remember to post my daily work activity. The problem is that I have been so busy lately that I don't have time before the day runs out, and then after I get home, I forget to post. I think I will set an even in my calendar to remind me to post every day.
In the meantime, I have been battling server issues. Our servers are 5-6 years old and they are showing signs of wear and tear. So much so, we are making some major changes at the co-op!
For starters, Southwest Arkansas Education Cooperative is now swaec.org! For email, for web. Instead of the long address we used to have, folks can now use swaec.org to reach our folks!
We will also be switching to Google Apps for Education! This will give us 24/7 uptime with total accessibility. Another features allows our users to monitor their own spam. I will enjoy passing that off onto the users. Right now, I have to go through the trapped mail and release it based on what I think is good mail. It takes a lot of time, but mostly, I am not the content police. I pass along what the users ultimately agree is junk, but I let them make that decision after I made the decision. That's just too many fingers in the pie, in my opinion.
We are also getting one server that will replace our dying ones. This will move us in the the world of virtualization. I am pretty old-school when it comes to certain things related to technology - servers WAS one of those things. I believed that I needed a physical server to handle separate tasks. Well, mostly. I think a server should be able to handle multiple tasks, depending on those functions. For example, one server can easily handle DHCP and DNS. Another one for Email. Another for user file storage. Maybe in the "real world." In education, there isn't money for that unless you get a grant (which we did 6 years ago or so). But even if you have multiple physical servers, the key is to make sure the servers are being used effectively and efficiently. Our servers were not, really. Of course, hindsight is, as they say, 20/20 vision.
With virtualization, I can set up individual servers to handle separate tasks, with the storage and access spread across multiple drives and network connections. It also makes backing up the servers a WHOLE lot easier!
On a different note, one of the schools' distance learning system was acting up so Trish and I headed down for a look. The document camera would not show on the screen. Turned out to be a combination of problems. The codec did not detect the unit and the touch panel did not even have the unit as an option on the screen! Okay, so the first thing I do is bypass the touch panel and hook the doc-cam directly to the codec. That worked, but it is clunky to switch devices with the remote control (versus using the touch panel). Once I knew things worked, it was time to make them work CORRECTLY. I reconnected the doc-cam to the touch panel (that is an over-simplification, I know). I went into the panel settings and activated the panel (along with the main camera, the dvd player, and the pc connection - all of which had been deactivated for some reason). After that, things still did not work correctly. Back to the first thing I ever learned in troubleshooting: when it doesn't work, reboot it and work out from there. After the reboot, everything worked again. Sweet!
On yet another note, the SWAEC technology training team met the other night to talk about (and start working on) modules for summer workshops. Most of the summer professional development will focus on Common Core State Standards along with iTunesU, ArkansasIDEAS, and Arkansas Digital Sandbox. It is going to be a wild and opportunistic summer!
SWAEC hosted the April state Technology Coordinator meeting for the first time since moving into the new building. I invited my area techs along for the meeting so they could get a feel for how things go at the state-level - a peek at what I do, in other words. I think overall it went well. In retrospect, I probably would have made some procedural suggestions for the invited guests, but the atmosphere we have as a group is generally pretty open-ended. Ideas are thrown around throughout an given conversation which leads to a little bit of chaos and whole lot of inspiration.
Now, I'm off to set up a recurring event in my calendar to remind me to write in this journal every work day.
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