Monday, June 8, 2009

Monday 6/8 from 10-3pm

Today was my first day interning at a nearby school. Mr. Wells, my supervising teacher, was in a meeting when I arrived so I was sent to his lead technician, Nick. We had a good conversation as he filled me in on the status of technology needs for summer school. Their network consists of approximately 800 computers and serves 3 schools, two district-owned houses, and administrative buildings. Summer school is in session and they have 2 school buildings, one with 3 classrooms with about 20 computers in each, that they assist with as needed. That will be one of my "duties" is to visit each teacher, and building each day to assist with any technology needs as they arise. There are approx 25 teachers teaching summer school. Fifteen of the teachers use PowerSchool, which is an integral part of the District and our next topic of discussion.


PowerSchool is a student Information system(SIS). During this time of year, not only is Power school used for summer school attendance and grades, it is tasked with the generation of numerous annual, district and state reports. As you can imagine, when you do something "annually" it may be hard to remember from year to year. That's where Nick and his Technology Office staff com in. I have used PowerSchool at this school as a sub to read the daily bulletin, take attendance and lunch counts, but don't know a fraction of what it takes to answer the questions being asked of Nick. In order to do and learn all I can I spent the last 2 hours today, reading the PowerSchool Introduction manual and viewed a tutorial on Live Side Scheduling.

The main points of the Live Side Scheduling are outlined below:

I. Power Scheduler
A. Auto-scheduler Set-Up
B. Copy Master Schedule
C. Creating Courses and Sections
D. Enabling Courses
E. Creating Sections
1. Attendance Info
2. Grading Info
F. Modify Schedule
G. Mass Enroll

II. Auto Walk In Scheduling(AWI)
A. Adding Requests
B. Scheduling Preferences
C. Running AWI

I took in a LOT of information and hope to retain some of it. I hope to be able use some of it to answer questions as they're thrown at me during the next three weeks. Mr. Wells set me up with a folder full of Help Documentation to read each afternoon. This will also give me something to read when I help to re-image the machines in the lab he has me stationed in. =) I am so exited...does that make me a geek?!?!


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