Week+8+(6.25-6.29)

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Today began the second part of my internship, which will focus more on the infrastructure aspect. I started the day with a tour with Hugh Torbert, our Director of Technology. He showed me the IDFs and MDFs in the new administration building. We also discussed the WLAN and LAN and how they are connected from the main wireless. The high school, where the main server is located, is wired to the administration building and to the intermediate building. The rest are wirelesly connected through a microwave tower. This tower operates at 100mbps. The actual wired connection is 54 mbps, but from a user's standpoint is probably operating more at a 20-30 mbps. What is interesting is that I just completed a powerpoint project about wireless networking and it recommended that a school be have at least 100 mbps for every 1,000 student and teacher users. This number, according to the article that I read, should increase dramatically to 1gbps by 2017-2018 to sufficiently service the users in an educational climate that is becoming increasingly geared towards and dependent on the internet. When I made this comment to Hugh, he agreed, but added that it is not feasibly with cost. Also, our district is limited by whatever the IU has. In order for us to upgrade, they have to as well.

Next I met with Dominic Papa, Network Specialist. We had a brief discussion of some of the things I may work on and he took me to where one of the computer technicians was working on updating a laptop cart.

The computer technician, Mike Parks, was working on updating the laptops because the new windows 2008 server doesn't accept the old naming system with underscores. Additionally, all of the laptop carts have to be updated with security, any windows/ adobe/java and then renamed (with the dashes instead of underscores). The laptops also have to be physically relabeled.Then Mike would contact Travis Hoban, our Senior Computer Technician, to push the new Zenworks out to the computers. Once that was finished, we restarted and checked to see if the new configuration location is correct. Then we put the computers back into the carts and begin the process with another round of computers.

One of the laptops was marked as not working by a teacher and left on the top of the cart. Mike determined after turning on the laptop that it needed a new hard drive. I observed the installation of a the new hard drive. I asked if it is logged/inventoried when they put in a new hard drive into a computer. Mike said that they are not logged. I also asked what they do with the old hard drives. Mike said that with student computers they simply throw them away because there is no sensitive/important information on the hard drives. The tech department keeps the old administration hard drives. Mike commented that the hard drives could be destroyed by either drilling holes in it or putting it near a strong magnetic field.

Once the hard drive was place in the computer, the machine had to be re-imaged. I had heard this term SO many times, but had never seen how it is done. It's actually a very simple process. I did not know that the tech department creates an image for each unique type of laptop (i.e. High school laptop, elementary laptop, etc.), then they just select that image to put on a computer.

I sent out reminder emails to those who had not yet submitted their work for the credits through Neumann University. I also had to create a screen cast for a participant who did not know how to activate her internal microphone so that she could use audio to create her little bird tale, which was her multimedia project.

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I created a powerpoint this week about a network software application for the Infrastructure class. I chose our web-based testing application, STARS. I discussed some points with our Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Dr. Sue Kanigsberg, about how the application was selected. I also discussed the impact of the STARS testing on our network with Dominic Papa. We discussed how bandwidth became an issue because at first we tried to do a whole grade level's testing at once. media type="custom" key="19615766"

We started to have an informal conversation about a teacher BYOD and the computer technician wanted to know my thoughts and what I thought other teachers would feel about it. We also discussed how policy might/might not have to change.

I had a meeting with the Network Specialist during which he showed me how he would virtually move a person from one building/position to another from the domain/ file servers perspective.

On Thursday, we had a meeting with the entire technology department to address projects/ items that need to be completed and discuss projects/items that are complete.

I also met with Hugh Torbert, our Technology Director, to discuss the technology budget included in our school's comprehensive plan.