What Are We Teaching to Todays Youth

I’m not going to speak to this issue, instead I will let the original article that inspired me to blog this do the talking.

Are iPod-banning schools cheating our kids?

The larger, more interesting question is: Why do we devote so much time and energy teaching kids to memorize facts we know they’ll forget? We should instead teach critical thinking, creative decision-making and sophisticated information retrieval.

Education, Technology, K12 Education

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Filed under: Education, Educational Technology, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education, Social Media, Technology, Web 2.0 , iPod, School

Holidays, Technology and Energy

The teachers and students are on winter break and the 12 month employees are working through the 23rd. I am taking the time to clean ActivBoard filters, catch up on some cleaning and other basic housekeeping. We sent information on what to turn off for the two week break so as I’ve been walking the campus for the filters, I’ve been checking on those technology items that needed to be turned off.

I’ve found that the worst offender of not being turned off in a room is the printer, followed by the monitor. According to the Office Equipment Energy Savings Calculator, LBL the following table shows that you can save $30 per printer annually by turning them off at night and logically more if you turn them off during breaks and on weekends. You can save an amazing $42 per monitor!

Equipment	Annual Energy Cost Off at Night	Annual Energy Cost On 24 Hours/Day
Monitor (15″)	$12	$54
Laser Printer	$14	$44

So lets just take these numbers and not consider that they are turned off for 2 weeks during the winter break and the 2 months of summer because they are usually left on during the weekends for the duration of the 10 month school year that teachers are here. Now, I’m going to use my school which is above 700 students but below 1000. With 4 computers per classroom with approximately 50 instructional rooms, 89 lab computers and 25 miscellaneous desktops on campus that would be 314 monitors and a savings of $13,188.00/year. As for the printers, we have 1 team printer per grade level, 1 per classroom, 3 in the labs and 25 for other staff. These numbers are approximate, which leads to a savings of $2,550.00/year for 85 printers.

Okay, my school is smaller and of course the high schools will be a lot larger, but I am going to just use my figures for our whole district. Lets take the total savings of $15,738.00 times the 43 elementary, middle and high schools we have and that is a savings of: $676,734.00 annually. That is on the low side because most of the other schools are larger than my school, especially the middle and high schools. But, if you look at that number you can see how saving that amount on just monitors and printers could be spent on something else in our currently tight fiscal situation as a district.

Think about it…

Filed under: Education, Educational Technology, Elementary School Information, K-12 Ed Tech, Technology , energy, Fiscal Savings

Using Windows “RunAs” Command for Network Administration

In our district the school technology support professionals have a limited account and an administrative account in the Active Directory. While most of the time I can administer my campus and users from the limited account, there are times when I need to access the administrative account for just one thing. An example of this is looking up a staff or student ID for a program they need access to.

In this case the steps for this simple thing are:

1. logging off
2. logging into the admin account
3. running the program to look up the ID
4. doing the look up
5. logging off
6. logging back into the limited account
7. adding the user into whatever I need to

Now, that is way too much to do for something so simple. So, my solution is to use “runas” in a batch file to run the program I need as the admin account. This saves all the wasted steps, while letting me be secure in my limited account. Security, plus ease and working smarter is what it’s all about.

So, what does the batch file look like? Here it is:

runas /user:adminusername@domainname “C:Directory pathFilename [any commands to send to the program]“

Okay, now here is a visual example:

runas /user:edutechation@edutechation.com “C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore http://mysite/admin”

The batch file will open a command window to ask you to input the admin password and if the password is correct it will launch Internet Explorer to the web site mysite/admin as the admin account with admin privileges. When you exit IE it drops the admin privileges so the next time you open IE it will be as the limited user account you are logged in as.

The time this saves me is invaluable. Try it, you’ll like it. If you would like to read about the runas command at Microsoft click here

Technorati Tags: RUNAS, Network Administration, Educational Technology

Filed under: Educational Technology, K-12 Ed Tech, Network Administration, Technology , runas