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The following technology tips and tricks are presented in no particular order. I hope they help!
Larry
Software installation.
Please limit the software that you install on your school computer to that which is necessary in your classroom or for your job here. Internet browser toolbars, like those from Google and Yahoo, are not a good idea. They invite trouble. Kodak Easy Share is another popular program that has a habit of slowing a computer greatly. The less “stuff” you install, the faster your computer will run and the more stable it will be.
Save to our network
Please save your documents, spreadsheets, lesson plans, and other important files on our network and not on your local computer. Files saved on our network are immediately written to a pair of redundant hard drives and are backed up on tape that night. Files saved on your local computer are a single hard drive crash away from extinction. If you need quick access to a file then save it to the network and create a desktop shortcut to the file. That gives you the best of both worlds – instant access and file protection. On school district teacher and staff computers, “My Documents” is mapped to H:\My Documents, so any files saved to My Documents are automatically stored on our network. It is a good idea to check this periodically. Right-click on “My Documents” and select Properties. It should tell you that the Target is H:\My Documents. If it says the target is anything on drive C: then that needs attention.
One exception to the “save to our network” rule involves United Streaming videos. Those work best if you do save them to your local computer and show them from there.
Automatic updates
You may notice from time to time that your computer is doing something “all by itself.” All of our computers are configured to check our WSUS server for Windows and Microsoft Office updates and to install those updates automatically. Sometimes those updates require the computer to restart. The update service will give a warning before the restart, but if you are not there to see the warning and have left work unsaved then that work will be lost. SO, just make sure you are saving your work as you go, which is good practice anyway.
Lock the desktop
If you need to step away from your computer and don’t want
prying eyes or twitchy fingers having their way with your machine, you can
quickly lock it. Press CTRL and
Change your password
It is good practice to change your login password periodically, especially if you suspect that somebody may know the one you are using. Please do not tape the password to the wall or the monitor or under the keyboard. That’s self-defeating. A good password should be six or more characters and should include upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. One easy way to create a password is to take a common word and “mutilate it.” For example, the word “speech” could become “Sp33c!.”
To change your computer password, after you are logged in,
press CTRL and
If you use GradeSpeed or TxEIS it’s a good idea to change those passwords periodically, too, and they should be a different password from the one that you use for login to the computer. In GradeSpeed, once you are logged in, click on your name in the left column, then select “Change Password.” For TxEIS the "Change Password" link is in the upper right corner of the home page, right next to "Logout."
Sleepy
Almost all of our computers have a program called Sleepy
that turns them off at a specified time.
If you need that shutdown time changed just let me know. I just need for it to be before
Email at home
You can access your school email from home at http://www.yisd.org/webmail/ . The login will be your email address, without the “@yisd.org.” Check with me for your webmail password.
GradeSpeed at home
You can access GradeSpeed from home at http://gs.yisd.org/gs/ . Please note that there is no “www” in the URL. That should get you the same login screen that you have at school.
If you do access GradeSpeed from home, or from any computer other than your normal teacher computer, then the next time that you login to GradeSpeed from your teacher computer you will receive a security warning that the program was accessed from another IP address. As long as YOU were the one doing the home access, that’s fine. If you ever login to GradeSpeed and get that warning when you have NOT been accessing it from another computer then please let me know, including the IP address of the outside access. That could be a sign of someone is attempting unauthorized access.
“Fake” email address
Some web sites require that you give them an email address before they will let you access their goodies. If that’s the case and you don’t want to provide your real address you can give them junk@yisd.org . That should satisfy the site and it will send any bulk emails from them to bit heaven.
Anti virus updates
Our computers are configured to check once a day for McAfee Anti Virus updates. It is a good idea to periodically verify that those updates are happening. In the lower right corner of your screen, near the clock, will be an icon that looks like a shield with a red “V” on it. Right-click that shield and select “About Virusscan Enterprise.” That will give you a window that will tell you when the virus definitions were last updated (DAT created on date ). If the date is more than a week old then please let me know.
Save as
The first time you save a file, use SAVE AS. That will let you specify the file name and the location to which you want it saved. After that just click SAVE.
The importance of this technique was demonstrated a few years ago by a district employee who had emailed himself a document from home to his school email address. He edited the document at school over the course of several hours. After each edit he hit the SAVE button. At the end of the day he closed Word and Outlook Express and shut down his computer. The next morning the document was gone. Why? He had opened the document from inside Outlook Express and had never specified WHERE the computer should save it. Windows took it upon itself to save the document and all of his edits to a temporary folder. When he exited Outlook Express, that temporary folder was deleted, along with all of his work.
This example is also one of my favorites when someone tries to explain to me how smart our computers have become. PLEASE! He edited that document several times over the course of several hours and it didn’t once occur to that oh-so-smart computer that the document might be something that he wanted to keep!
SPAM tagging
Emails coming in to our district email server pass through a couple of filters before they reach your Inbox. About 92% of what tries to get in dies in the first filter. If the filters think a message might be spam but they’re not sure, then they allow the message to be delivered but they tag it as {SPAM?}. Outlook Express on our computers is configured with an email rule to send messages that are tagged as {SPAM?} to a spam folder instead of to your Inbox. Filters are not perfect, so it is a good idea to check that spam folder periodically just to be sure that nothing wanted has been incorrectly tagged.
Spam tagging is an imprecise process at best, so if you are having legitimate emails tagged as spam, or if you are having unwanted messages slip through, then please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to tweak the filters.
Time synchronization
Clocks that display the wrong time have always irked me a bit, so I try to keep our computer network time correct. One of our Novell servers syncs with an NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Internet Time Server. Our other servers sync from that, and each computer clock is synchronized every time you login. So the time displayed by your computer’s clock should be correct to within a few seconds.