Kevin Stachowski's Posts - Classroom 2.02024-03-29T13:38:58ZKevin Stachowskihttps://www.classroom20.com/profile/stachowskikhttps://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1949903994?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1https://www.classroom20.com/profiles/blog/feed?user=stachowskik&xn_auth=noEnd of the first one-to-one yeartag:www.classroom20.com,2009-05-23:649749:BlogPost:3447472009-05-23T02:19:57.000ZKevin Stachowskihttps://www.classroom20.com/profile/stachowskik
I can't believe I'm at the end of the first year of our one-to-one program! I'm also sorry I haven't been more faithful bloggin my experiences. On a scale of 0 to 100 with 0 being a complete disaster and 100 being a complete success I would rate our program in the upper 80s. I've been amazed at how rough the students have been on the tablets. And am thankful that I teach in an all girls school! I guess my hope was that the students would treat their tablets/laptops like the teachers had treated…
I can't believe I'm at the end of the first year of our one-to-one program! I'm also sorry I haven't been more faithful bloggin my experiences. On a scale of 0 to 100 with 0 being a complete disaster and 100 being a complete success I would rate our program in the upper 80s. I've been amazed at how rough the students have been on the tablets. And am thankful that I teach in an all girls school! I guess my hope was that the students would treat their tablets/laptops like the teachers had treated them for the last 8 years. I guess that was a bit naive. We are currently reimaging the teacher laptops with the requisite problem, different every time. This time when we boot a teacher tablet that's been imaged it produces the blue screen of death within 5 seconds. After several frustrating days figured out that fixboot and fixmbr corrects this, however we still don't know what's causing the problem. Getting ready to reimage 162 class of 2012 laptops starting June 3rd, wish us luck!Bad at Bloggingtag:www.classroom20.com,2008-10-08:649749:BlogPost:1972072008-10-08T02:06:56.000ZKevin Stachowskihttps://www.classroom20.com/profile/stachowskik
I'm not very good at this blogging thing. I think you're supposed to do it more than once a month.<br />
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The tablet program is going well. I'm grateful for all those schools that did one-to-one programs before we did. We definitely learned from your successes as well as your pitfalls. Thanks!<br />
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I wish I could get the students to treat their tablets as well as the teachers do. I have to bite my tongue not to yell at them when I see them carrying the tablet by the screen.<br />
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From a teaching perspective,…
I'm not very good at this blogging thing. I think you're supposed to do it more than once a month.<br />
<br />
The tablet program is going well. I'm grateful for all those schools that did one-to-one programs before we did. We definitely learned from your successes as well as your pitfalls. Thanks!<br />
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I wish I could get the students to treat their tablets as well as the teachers do. I have to bite my tongue not to yell at them when I see them carrying the tablet by the screen.<br />
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From a teaching perspective, it's great having them with the tablets every single day. No more having to book a tablet cart and spend time handing out and collecting tablets.<br />
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We have Bryan from DyKnow coming out from indy to train a group of the freshmen teachers tomorrow. I've found DyKnow to be one of the best apps I've ever used (no there not paying me to say this). Consistently it works. I tell my class to login to DyKnow and I keep expecting them to have problems, but almost all of the time I see 28 of 28 enrolled.<br />
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Pens! What going on with the tablet pens. So many of the student have broken the buttons off or the clips. They are constantly having the pens stuck inside the tablets. Someone need to make a tablet pen that doesn't break! I may be exaggerating the problem but currently it's the #1 problem I hear about.<br />
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I applied to do a session at Etech today. If I'm accepted I'll talk about integrating Blackboard, DyKnow, and OneNote in a one-to-one learning environment.3 Weeks Intag:www.classroom20.com,2008-09-06:649749:BlogPost:1860422008-09-06T02:52:24.000ZKevin Stachowskihttps://www.classroom20.com/profile/stachowskik
Well, it's been over a month since my last blog post. After the 7 Tablet Pickup Days we went right into 7 three hour Tablet Orientation sessions. We got the DyKnow server up and running in time for the third orientation session. A week after the last orientation session was the first day of school. DyKnow has been fantastic it's been a lot of fun to teach with. It really keeps the students engaged. More later, I'm tired...
Well, it's been over a month since my last blog post. After the 7 Tablet Pickup Days we went right into 7 three hour Tablet Orientation sessions. We got the DyKnow server up and running in time for the third orientation session. A week after the last orientation session was the first day of school. DyKnow has been fantastic it's been a lot of fun to teach with. It really keeps the students engaged. More later, I'm tired...Tablet Pickup Dayztag:www.classroom20.com,2008-07-28:649749:BlogPost:1694262008-07-28T02:30:00.000ZKevin Stachowskihttps://www.classroom20.com/profile/stachowskik
Well there finally here, the days I've been scheduling from my website form for the last 4-5 months... Tablet pickup days! We made it through our first two days, wow am I tired, now only 5 more to go! It's hard for me to believe this day has finally arrived, we've been preparing for 7 years for a one-to-one computing program and it's finally here. Things went well through the first two sessions, I hope, and pray that they continue for the other 5. W.C. Fields is often quoted as saying, "Never…
Well there finally here, the days I've been scheduling from my website form for the last 4-5 months... Tablet pickup days! We made it through our first two days, wow am I tired, now only 5 more to go! It's hard for me to believe this day has finally arrived, we've been preparing for 7 years for a one-to-one computing program and it's finally here. Things went well through the first two sessions, I hope, and pray that they continue for the other 5. W.C. Fields is often quoted as saying, "Never work with animals or children." If he were alive today, he certainly would include computers and technology. No matter how much you plan or prepare something can always go awry.Laptop Institute, Tablets, and Serverstag:www.classroom20.com,2008-07-19:649749:BlogPost:1654212008-07-19T02:15:14.000ZKevin Stachowskihttps://www.classroom20.com/profile/stachowskik
Our student workers got the rest of the tablets imaged yesterday, so at least that is done! One month from today we have the opening faculty in-service. It's going to be a crazy month.<br />
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Went to the Laptop Institute in Memphis from Sunday thru Wednesday. It was a fantastic conference. I highly recommend it to anyone if there school is even remotely considering a one-to-one program. My biggest takeaway of the conference is the realization that putting a tablet in the hands of every McAuley…
Our student workers got the rest of the tablets imaged yesterday, so at least that is done! One month from today we have the opening faculty in-service. It's going to be a crazy month.<br />
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Went to the Laptop Institute in Memphis from Sunday thru Wednesday. It was a fantastic conference. I highly recommend it to anyone if there school is even remotely considering a one-to-one program. My biggest takeaway of the conference is the realization that putting a tablet in the hands of every McAuley student will make a type and a level of learning possible that was never possible before. I know it will do a lot to transform the way in which I teach.<br />
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We're trying to get the Dyknow server up and running. Yesterday I got Windows 2003 installed and patched on the VMware server. Jeff and I couldn't get the Windows 2003 server to boot from the CD for several hours. I'm new to VMware so I played around with it trying to get it to boot from the iso images didn't work, neither did the host device or the Client device. Then I realized I was trying to boot the Client Device while running Remote Desktop to the Virtual center server. One hop too many. When I closed the remote desktop and opened the Virtual Infrastructure Client I was able to boot from the Client Device CD and install Windows 2003. I got in patched before I left at 7:30PM.<br />
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Jeff called our Dyknow support person today to ask about setting up two network cards on a Windows 2003 server and set up training. He ended up disabled the second network card so we could get on with the installation. Jeff, Jon and I then tried to install Microsoft SQL 2005. Note the word tried. Another road block. While it was installing from disk 2 it gave the message that SQL.cab was corrupt or missing. Jeff started the download of the second disk from CDWG after 5:30. I hung around since I still had some things to finish up. When I got the download to complete I made the CD and got the same error. Apparently other people have had issues installing MS SQL 2005 on VMware. I Googled it and found we weren't the only people to get the error. I may go in tomorrow and see if I can figure it out.More imaging frustrations and successtag:www.classroom20.com,2008-07-12:649749:BlogPost:1604802008-07-12T20:14:37.000ZKevin Stachowskihttps://www.classroom20.com/profile/stachowskik
No luck the tablets still wouldn't boot just that stupid blinking underscore. I tried booting the XP CD with the same results -- blue screen of death about hardware error. Went home frustrated at 8pm having spent 11 hours in the building.<br />
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Next day started googling ZenWorks Imaging and other associated phrases. Got on Lenovo forumn, they made mention of using the -IB switch on ghost if the imaged computers don't boot. Did more research trying to find out what the equivalent of the -IB switch is…
No luck the tablets still wouldn't boot just that stupid blinking underscore. I tried booting the XP CD with the same results -- blue screen of death about hardware error. Went home frustrated at 8pm having spent 11 hours in the building.<br />
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Next day started googling ZenWorks Imaging and other associated phrases. Got on Lenovo forumn, they made mention of using the -IB switch on ghost if the imaged computers don't boot. Did more research trying to find out what the equivalent of the -IB switch is in ZenWorks Imaging. Found post that said there isn't -ib switch in Zenworks imaging, but it made reference to the zen partition which we don't have. I wonder if we set it up would it keep the boot partition from getting screwed up?<br />
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Then I remembered that the blue screen of death said something about a hard disk error or a problem with the hard disk drivers or possible virus. Then I remembered looking at an older bios that had some setting in the bios to block viruses at boot up or some similar nonsense. So I figured I'd go over to school to check the bios setting. When I got there I didn't find any reference to antivirus in the bios, but under security I did find something about memory protection so I disabled it and rebooted... Nope, same stupid blue screen! So I kept poking around in the bios, I saw a reference to the SATA drive, which I think is new to this particular thinkpad. The error said something about hard drives, so maybe this is it. It had two settings in the bios. It was set to something like AHCI or compatibility. I switched it to compatibility and rebooted from the Windows XP CD... Success! I was able to run the Repair with fixboot and fixmbr, I rebooted and the image successfully booted! I went back into the bios and changed the SATA setting back to AHCI. And I got this done in about an hour which makes me feel a little better about the hours I wasted. I wonder if a Windows XP SP3 CD would boot without having to change the setting to compatability? Now at least I know they can image the student tablets while I'm gone to Memphis at the Laptop institute.Tech Documentation Blogtag:www.classroom20.com,2008-07-11:649749:BlogPost:1601292008-07-11T23:06:49.000ZKevin Stachowskihttps://www.classroom20.com/profile/stachowskik
Blogging is something that up till now never really caught my interest. I really don't read other people's blogs, so I guess I never thought of writting one. However, as I'm sitting here in the tech office at my school at 7pm on a Friday night after struggling with creating a ZenWorks image of the student tablet that actually works, it occurs to me that it would be good to document some of these experiences in case I find myself in the same postition.<br />
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ZenWorks imaging has never really worked…
Blogging is something that up till now never really caught my interest. I really don't read other people's blogs, so I guess I never thought of writting one. However, as I'm sitting here in the tech office at my school at 7pm on a Friday night after struggling with creating a ZenWorks image of the student tablet that actually works, it occurs to me that it would be good to document some of these experiences in case I find myself in the same postition.<br />
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ZenWorks imaging has never really worked as flawless as it appears in the product literature. We always have to come up with workarounds to get it to work. I currently think the problem might have to do with the service partition on the tablet. It was the second partition on the drive and zenworks imaging couldn't see it. Somehow it being there may have messed up the boot record so the tablet wouldn't boot. Usually if the boot record gets messed up we can boot from a Windows XP CD and run FixBoot and FixMbr to correct the problem, but when I try to boot these tablets with the WinXP SP2 CD I get the blue screen of death hardware error. I don't know if it has something to do with the tablet hardware, SP3 being on the tablet, or the partitions being out of wack. So I deleted the service partition, resized the C drive to take up the space that was filled up and am trying a multicast image to two tablets right now. I wish I could have preserved the service partiton, I don't think rescue and recovery will work without it, but at least I'll get my tablets imaged.