Wow! I can certainly tell summer has arrived! I have been running all over the place for the last week and a half, not even taking time to make notes here. I have a few moments, so I thought I would catch everyone up.
March 28 - Memorial Day, Office Closed
March 29 - Drove to Bradley to help with moving user home folders. That was not good. For some reason, changes to the active directory are not getting rolled out to the users. I am still trying to figure that one out. I had to change everyone's home folder redirection back to the old server and set their home folders back in the profiles. What's weird is that the profiles connected their home folder and mapped it. But, Windows would never update the group policy to the location for My Documents. I thought I had conflicting policies somewhere, but everything I did checked out. And, *NEW* users would get the redirect. I understand I may have to delete local profiles, and I am not looking forward to that at all.
March 30 - Apple Products Demo - Looked at iTunesU, iBooks, iBooks Author, MDM, Lion, and other Apple offerings. In the afternoon, participants looked at Casper for MDM and talked about tablet rollouts, summer projects, etc.
March 31 - Began updating iMacs in lab to Snow Leopard 6.8 in preparation for Lion/Mtn Lion rollout. Hit major bandwidth snags. Performed other duties as well - helping out with tech in other workshops, etc.
June 1 - Office closed, but I came in to check on iMac update progress. Not good. So, I got a few started instead of doing whole lab.
June 4 - Came back into office early, started updates again. Also changed firewall to allow al traffic to Apple without scanning. That helped immensely and immediately. By day's end, most Macs were well on way to updating. Left it run over night. During the day, I helped get workshops going, found a problem with an AeroHive device and got it back up and going again. Other tech duties kept me running all day long.
June 5 - Tuesday all Macs were updated. One had the "infinite login loop." So, after I helped get workshops started, I concentrated on getting that Mac up and going. None of the tips I found online worked. I left the day trying to reinstall OS X. I copied Windows XP from one Parallels to external drive, which I then transferred to a "spare" machine.
June 6 - Came in to find the reinstall did not fix the issue. Evidently, it just tried to "fix" what was broken and missed. So, I put the "spare" in its place and moved the non-working machine to another location to work on it. In the meantime, I got workshops going then used an external hard drive to make a Time Machine backup. When that was done, I used that backup to restore the errant iMac. That worked perfectly (after some minor reconfiguration to prevent duplicate names, etc, on the network). For the record, the Mac that went bad after the update was the only Mac in the lab that actually required a login. All the other Macs were set to auto login. Also - I have *NOT* restarted the other Macs because we have APSCN training all week in that lab. if ain't broke, I ain't fixing it until I need to!
June 7 - I will help get workshops going and then we have the retirement program for Lindy and Nell. I will take care of other issues as needed during the day, as usual.
June 8 - Our offices are closed on Fridays in the summer.
Showing posts with label apple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apple. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
January 9-13, 2011
Monday - Office
Tuesday - State Tech Meeting
Wednesday - Office/Open
Thursday - Office/Open
Friday - Office
Monday: I spent the morning working on several projects. First, I helped get our bookkepper's office back in order after the floor waxing over the weekend. Yes, I did that last Monday, too. Only this time, we had a different set of rooms to set back to rights because the floor guy didn't realize his key would open all the doors. I started working on our Moodle server to add content (create a course). During that, my Director came in and wanted help with her iPad2 - FaceTime, accounts, etc.
I went back to Moodle to finish creating the course I am working on. We are moving the TIE program modules from word/pdf handouts to a mixed-mode enviroment for in-class/asynchronous professional development. Basically, the courses are taught in a classroom setting and we use Moodle for content delivery and online discussion during the course. The State requires 6 hours of "seat time" for professional development, so this is a way to get the physical requirement taken care of while letting the participants have the freedom to complete many of the tasks at their own pace. During the course of the day (most are 1-day sessions), the facilitator brings the group back together for in-class discussion. This is the first time we are trying this arrangment, and I'm anxious to see how it all plays out this summer.
While working on the Moodle course (we will have dozens uploaded/modified before a February meeting), I met with our Early childhood coordinator about Apple Volume Licensing. We bought some vouchers, and now just have to wait for them to be delivered before we can redeem them. Seriously!? In today's age of full-on electrnic purchasing, why on earth does Apple may you buy phyiscal vouchers to redeem!? Ugh.
After that was done, I returned to the Moodle module. One area of concern raised up as forums and discussions. As it turns out, "Guest Access" is not available for those sections. There are two solutions: 1) Require each user to sign up for access, or 2) do not hold online discussions and make them in-class only. We're not sure which route we're taking yet. The whole state has several statewide Moodle-based rollouts, and requiring participants to register on each of the Moodle servers is a bit much, in my opinion.
Oh, I forgot, I also worked on a user's Google Calendar. The events would show up on her phone, iPad, etc, but not in the online calendar. The problem? It was hidden online. In "My Calendars," the user has de-selected the default calendar. I reselected the box, and everything showed up. Awesome!
Now, lunch break and the rest of the afternoon (for Monday)!
While working on modules for Moodle, I encountered a few .pages files that were created on a Mac. I am using a PC and my MacBook doesn't have Pages on it, so I was a bit stumped as to what to do (short of asking the author to export them as PDF). Instead, here is a solution: change the extension to .ZIP and open the files with Winzip or whatever. Inside there, you will find a folder called "QuickLook." Inside Quicklook, you will find a PDF of the .pages document! Bingo! Copy and paste the content, and you should be good to go.
Tuesday - State Tech Meeting
Wednesday - Office/Open
Thursday - Office/Open
Friday - Office
Monday: I spent the morning working on several projects. First, I helped get our bookkepper's office back in order after the floor waxing over the weekend. Yes, I did that last Monday, too. Only this time, we had a different set of rooms to set back to rights because the floor guy didn't realize his key would open all the doors. I started working on our Moodle server to add content (create a course). During that, my Director came in and wanted help with her iPad2 - FaceTime, accounts, etc.
I went back to Moodle to finish creating the course I am working on. We are moving the TIE program modules from word/pdf handouts to a mixed-mode enviroment for in-class/asynchronous professional development. Basically, the courses are taught in a classroom setting and we use Moodle for content delivery and online discussion during the course. The State requires 6 hours of "seat time" for professional development, so this is a way to get the physical requirement taken care of while letting the participants have the freedom to complete many of the tasks at their own pace. During the course of the day (most are 1-day sessions), the facilitator brings the group back together for in-class discussion. This is the first time we are trying this arrangment, and I'm anxious to see how it all plays out this summer.
While working on the Moodle course (we will have dozens uploaded/modified before a February meeting), I met with our Early childhood coordinator about Apple Volume Licensing. We bought some vouchers, and now just have to wait for them to be delivered before we can redeem them. Seriously!? In today's age of full-on electrnic purchasing, why on earth does Apple may you buy phyiscal vouchers to redeem!? Ugh.
After that was done, I returned to the Moodle module. One area of concern raised up as forums and discussions. As it turns out, "Guest Access" is not available for those sections. There are two solutions: 1) Require each user to sign up for access, or 2) do not hold online discussions and make them in-class only. We're not sure which route we're taking yet. The whole state has several statewide Moodle-based rollouts, and requiring participants to register on each of the Moodle servers is a bit much, in my opinion.
Oh, I forgot, I also worked on a user's Google Calendar. The events would show up on her phone, iPad, etc, but not in the online calendar. The problem? It was hidden online. In "My Calendars," the user has de-selected the default calendar. I reselected the box, and everything showed up. Awesome!
Now, lunch break and the rest of the afternoon (for Monday)!
While working on modules for Moodle, I encountered a few .pages files that were created on a Mac. I am using a PC and my MacBook doesn't have Pages on it, so I was a bit stumped as to what to do (short of asking the author to export them as PDF). Instead, here is a solution: change the extension to .ZIP and open the files with Winzip or whatever. Inside there, you will find a folder called "QuickLook." Inside Quicklook, you will find a PDF of the .pages document! Bingo! Copy and paste the content, and you should be good to go.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)