Sunday 15 June 2008

Reflection to date

Reports -
yet another mid year reports has come around and it has been nice not to worry about another class of reports. with the change of the number of periods it has reduced the number of classes that we teach. Though I still need to look at the time that I put aside to do the reports, i need to start them earlier rather than waiting to the last minute. I have manged to use very few copied comments this year, preferring to type my own comments on each student. especially in the senior subject classes. it has been difficult with some when you seem to use the same start phrase with each student. i need to learn to be able to start off differently.

IT Support - issues and successes(printers, ssl, option choice)
i have had to in the last couple of days deal with the hp helpdesk, it is interesting that they are in india and when you say where your work is you can hear the gasp with fear as they have never heard of that place, especially because it is in maori. after the hour of script and them asking for you to b e right beside the printer, the printer was three blocks away from where i was on the phone, they managed to get there heads around that I had a p3005 printer but it had a p3004 formater board in it. someone had replaced a part in it with the wrong part number. the main fault was that we needed duplex printing which had been removed as the p3004 formater board did not support this function.
we are currently trying to get ssl working properly with the exchange software we have at school, the reason for this is that we want to start using mobile devices to connect to the email system when the senior leadership are not at their laptops, so they don't miss those important emails. plus it will help me with my little wee ipaq.
creating an online app os starting to become interesting, i have seven people that I have to work through, all wanting different features and all want an understanding of how it will work. this will be my first big job in a number of years, as normally i deal with one or two people as my client. my biggest fear is of the feature creep as more and more people want to remove the choice of subjects for the students by stating what English and maths class they will be in.

Manager - difficulty with losing, rules being changed
I have been the manager of the schools 1st xv rugby team, which has been an up and down experience. you have a up when the team wins and feel the pain when the team loses, because you know how much effort they have put into the game. the last game probably hit me the hardest. the touch judge came on to the field with his flag out and we had a penalty changed from our to theirs, as well as having a try disallowed. a number of the players and myself had been to associate refs training where this question was raised, if the game was a sancitaned game and the refs were appointed then they can come on, if not they can only signal out. so far noone has been able to answer if they were appointed.

School- three programming languages all at once.
I am teaching visual basic with the year 12s, visual c# with the year 13 and php/mySQL with the year 13s. i am starting to get confused with variables and syntax which is causing me some issues, i am starting to print out the solution so i can solve the students issues and problems.

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