New Back Haul Line

A new back haul line inter-connecting our two most used network switches doubles the bandwidth between them.  This should allow for more and faster server access particularly for users in the east wing and administrative areas of the building.

The 7 Habits...

New Access Points added in Bible Classrooms!

Today we installed 2 new access points in each Bible classroom.  This completes the East Wing access point upgrades.  Every classroom (and the library and staff lounge) in the East Wing now have Access points!  Yay!

Summer Upgrades!

A few of the things we're working on this summer....

• More access points.... we should have one in nearly every classroom by the time school starts.
• Single-sign on.  No more seperate password for Google and WWVA computers.  (Sorry Apple ID is still seperate)
• Computer upgrades!  New computers in the drop-in lab and for faculty
• Network hardening (in preperation for...)
• 1-1 iPad Deployment!

It s a busy summer!

Software Licensing for Home Use

Looking for Office Software for your home computer?  Here are some options:

Unfortunately WWVA’s licensing agreement with Microsoft only allows WWVA software to be used on computers owned by the school.  But there are other options for free or discounted software for home use available.  See:

1)       WWVA provides free Google Apps accounts to all students and faculty.  This includes the complete bundle of Google services including docs, videos, calendar, email, and more.   To access Google Docs go to http://docs.wwva.org and login with your username and password.  You can then create documents including:

a.       Document (word processing for reports and papers)

b.      Spreadsheet (for crunching numbers, accounting, or other tabular data)

c.       Presentation (like PowerPoint, create presentations online)

d.      Drawing (create vector line drawings and diagrams)

2)      http://OpenOffice.org and http://LibreOffice.org are two similar free Office products.  By default these programs use their own file format, but you can modify them to use the Microsoft format used by Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  This article has great information on doing that.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-9864262-68.html

                Both these programs include word processing (Writer), Spreadsheet (Calc), Presentation (Impress), and Drawing  (Draw).

3)      Discounts are available on many software products from our partner http://techhead.org    Techhead provides academic discounts on software to students and faculty of Organization for Educational Technology and Curriculum (OETC).  WWVA is a member of this organization.

4)      Finally, the website http://needsoftware.com often has bargain prices on educational software licensing.

Whatever option you choose remember to choose genuine licensed software for your computing needs.  Computer ethics includes respecting the intellectual property rights of others.

Permissions

Greetings,

A faculty member brought to my attention that permissions had been configured in such a way as to allow faculty members to access one another's files.  As a matter of policy, I agreed that this was probably not the best configuration--unless that faculty member explicitly granted these rights.

Unfortunately, resolving this issue resulted in major changes to the permission tree for the faculty volume and as a result has caused problems for most of the faculty members in accessing their files.   Symptoms of these problems include missing icons on the desktop or an inability to access your My Documents folder.  If you experience any of these symptoms, please log out from your account and contact me right away.  Once I am aware that you are experiencing the problem (and our logged out of your account), I can fix it pretty quickly.

Sorry for this--I know it's a major inconvenience.  Thanks for your patience as we resolve this issue.

Raising the Digital Generation

As the new school year begins and we finish revising our new technology acceptable use policy/contract, I revisit issues related to teaching young adults to use technology responsibly. This is a great video by a leading new media academic, Henry Jenkins.



I really appreciate his perspective on these issues.