Friday, December 14, 2007

Who wants to be an expert Mac user? "Pick me!" says Mr. Loecker!


Teacher "Boot Camp" v. 2.0
This is the 2nd and 3rd groups of teachers to go through a half-day "Boot Camp" training session. Covered were the basics of operating a Mac including terminology, familiarity with the Leopard operating system, tips for converting for Windows users, and a general overview of getting in and out of programs and around on your machine.

Apple Employee #3


We have our own Apple expert right here on staff! Mrs. Dean has been a pro at helping out and taking on new challenges... she's hoping for an iPromotion soon!

Pilot Students...BETA Group!




Ten O'Neill High School students were issued the first 10 student MacBooks for a week of piloting our first student image. A Google doc was created to keep track of the problems and issues collaboratively as a group. Also, Apple Remote Desktop is being used to troubleshoot and view the students' use throughout the school. After this first week of student piloting is up, the Tech Team will collect the MacBooks and view the Spector Screen Captures as we have that software set to save for 7 days. This will help us reevaluate and decide on some policies, procedures, and settings before deployment.

The 'Big Mac' is up and running


Our server is set up and running. Named the "Big Mac" by Trevor D., this powerful machine will be the " central brain" of O'Neill's 24-7 Learning. Apple Professional Services spent three days setting up the Big Mac, as well as the rest of the infrastructure, and we are ready to start imaging machines.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Un-boxing and Inventory







To organize and inventory our new MacBooks we used a label creator and a bar code scanner. All MacBooks have a school ID# that is displayed on three labels-- the backside of the laptop itself, the underside of the battery, and the powercord "brick." The ID is scanned into our FileMaker Pro Inventory database, along with the MacBook serial number, Airport ID, Ethernet ID, and student name. As we continue with student use, our hope is that our maintainance log coincides with our inventory database, providing thorough records on each MacBook's history and use. Our MacBooks are currently being stored like books on a bookshelf, in numerical order to ease our cataloging process.