You get asked the strangest things sometimes.
While sitting up in B10 this afternoon, dealing with student netbook issues, a staff member came up to start her off on her crocheting as she couldn't remember how to do it!!
So..... Netbooks and Crochet.... does that sound like the title of a murder mystery?
I made the How To site a while ago for staff to dip into when they have questions and can't get hold of anyone to help them. It is definitely an ongoing site, with a slow build up of content.
I started on the site by doing lots of screen shots of how to do things and creating step by steps.
Now I am getting more into creating screencasts using Quicktime. There is an extremely handy dandy "new screen recording" option there.
If you don't have the Quicktime version that does this, there is an online programme called Screenr. This is useful, as you can also download the screen cast that you make so you have more control over hosting it.
Recently, after the 2 week break, I have had various staff members wanting refreshers on adding site pages onto the horizontal navigation bar and onto the drop down menus, so I decided to make screen casts to cover these two things. The first one took 3 tries as I hadn't made one for a while and kept starting to talk too early, and stumbling over my words. I got there in the end, but it is weird sitting in an empty quiet classroom, talking to a computer screen!!
We are 2 weeks into the new term and it has been NON STOP. They ( we all have a "they"..!! ) did something to the wireless over the 2 week break, and when we came back non of the students netbooks would connect as it had forgotten all of the pre shared keys (psk's)...aarrggghhhhh.....
The new system for getting a psk onto the netbooks was not playing the game so students and staff were incredibly frustrated at not being able to get online. Up in B10 ( netbook central !! ), it was complete chaos with students up there by the truck load with issues. We ended up supplying temporary guest passwords just so they could get online and get on with their work. There were signs up all over the place with the passwords on, trips around class rooms to write it up on the board and it seemed like more students were at the netbook room than in class, at times.
We now have a list of new psk's, but we have to get the netbooks to forget all of their preferences so they will accept the new ones. I am writing this in a brief gap between collecting netbooks from classrooms and setting them up for Leon ( one of the tech guys ) to put the new psk's on. Oh well.......... I suppose it keeps me fit.
.JPG)
