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Over the weekend I was browsing the cnn.com website and came across these videos of 25 influencial people and both of these stuck out for me. The first video discusses a school that is based on student- centered learning. Sir Ken Robinson actually makes an appearance at the end of the video and states that he met the three gentleman who helped to found the school at the infamous creativity TED talk. I would like to investigate this school more. I am interested to know how they incoporate technology and how they manage to support such a student- centered approach.

The second video piqued my interest because we had a discussion about this man in my infrastructure class. I think my main concern is that there are so many children in America who may not have access to computers, why does this man choose to send them other places?

This week I worked more in the computer lab at one of our elementary schools to make sure that they are updated with virus software and Windows. We also changed the names on the domain.

I also worked to remove old desktops from our domain and unregister them so that they can be removed from the classrooms and disposed of. This is a major point of contention for quite a few teachers. All teachers who have IWBs (which is almost all teachers in the district) have a laptop. They also have a desktop computer. This means that the district is paying to license two computers for almost every teacher. The desktops that we are disposing of are also extremely old (8-9 years) and very slow. Being so old makes replacing parts in the desktops costly as well. The reason that teachers are concerned about the removal of the desktops is because our laptops are always hooked up to the IWBs, which are not at our desks. Also, I've heard people complain about losing the desktop because of the size of the screen and the lack of a mouse. Quite honestly, it's a matter of people getting used to using the laptop. The problem is that it was never clearly communicated why the desktops were being removed (cost issue) and the announcement came at the end of the year in a "by-the-way" fashion.

After we took the computers out of the domain and unregistered them from ZenWorks, we had to break down the computers and take out the hard drives. We ran into a problem after 9 of the computers had their hard drives removed. The Network manager called and said that some of the computers were not showing up as being taken out of the domain. The problem is that the hard drives would have to be matched back with their original computer to figure out which ones were taken out of the domain. It was going to be a nightmare to figure it out. However, 7 of the nine computers were successfully removed. Luckily, I remember which computer it probably was that was not taken out of the domain. A teacher was in the building yesterday using her computer when we were unregistering and taking them out of the domain, so we did not work on her computer. Today when we arrived, she had already broken down her computer (thinking she was helping) and neither of us (myself or the computer technician) thought about the domain and unregister issue. Hers was the FIRST computer that we took the hard drive out of, so it was going to be one of the ones on the bottom of the stack. We logged in locally and used a map of the school to determine which computer was the one that was not labeled.