2012-09-HHS

I'm going to try to put out brief notes twice a month to give you information about new and developing tech upgrades and changes. Here's the first…

From the Computer Lab

Unless you are sending private/confidential information directly to one of the staff, please do not use personal e-mails for tech requests. We are using a new Help Desk system to track jobs(it bugs us until we get it done :-)) and it requires that you use the hhs-tech@dresden.us e-mail. If you send directly to one of us, you risk your requests being overlooked and we don't want that to happen. Similarly, if you have requests for carts, please e-mail hhsmedia.center@hanovernorwichschools.org. Sending directly to Erica's e-mail may result in your requests not getting recorded if she has to be absent for any reason.

Powerschool App for Parents and Students

Pearson has just released a new Portal app for the iPhone, iPad and iTouch. The app can be downloaded from the App store and gives easy access to portal information. The setup is trivial and only requires that parents/students know that we're in the Dresden School District (not Lebanon) and their username and password for the portal.

Changes to Google Docs

Google docs has been changed to "Google Drive" If you've missed the "Google Docs" menu, that's why. Attached to this e-mail is a short explanation (prepared by Becky) which describes these changes and a couple of tips for dealing with this change.

Word bug in the new Student Accounts

Unfortunately as many of you have already found out, there is a Microsoft Word bug in the student accounts that doesn't allow the students to save files to the desktop or documents folder. A workaround is to have them save the picture folder and then copy the file to the desktop. If they do that, they'll be able to access the word document from any computer. If they leave their file in the "Pictures" folder, they will only be able to access it from the computer they were using at the time they saved the file. We are working with our Mac server gurus to try to find a solution but for now this is the only work around. We apologize for the inconvenience.

From the Media Center

So far this year we have had 3 carts returned with a laptop missing and one entire cart missing at the end of the day. Please try to be careful to check the cart each period to make sure that all of the laptops have been returned. Erica has to spend a lot of time searching for "lost" laptops. Please try to be extra considerate given the high volume of requests we have already had this year.

As always, please feel free to stop by the technology lab with questions.