M.A. Hochberg’s Technology for Teaching

End of the year gifts are rare for non-teachers but sometimes we are remembered with the perfect gift.

This computer is made from two ounces of Euphoria Chocolate. Thank you!

Prepping our laptops for year-end and Puppet installation has turned up another serial number oddity. On some MacBooks, the serial number under the battery does not match the internal serial number.

As part of the clean up and prep, per our school secretary, I have been writing the Eugene School District tag number under the battery. Many of the silver tags have lost the printed tag number and it has been a challenge to find the correct tag number.

Since I already have the battery out, I have been confirming that I have the correct laptop by comparing the serial number in the battery compartment to the one on my worksheets. Until today, they have matched. Then I found one that didn’t match. Booting the laptop and checking the internal serial number showed the number on my worksheet.

So far, I’ve only found the problem on Core Duo MacBooks, MID MacBook1,1.

This is the third serial number quirk I have found so far. I hope there aren’t any more!

I’ve been relying on ARD to gather data for our imaging project. I learned pretty quickly to be sure to click on”Rebuild data for report” when generating the reports. If I didn’t, it would include odd or duplicate information.

Once I got the complete report, I used the information to determine Machine ID, memory needs, etc. One key field is the serial number field. That will be the computer name for Puppet and on the exterior computer label.

As I put on the new labels, I’ve been checking the serial number in the computer with the computer number on the label. Imagine my panic when I came across one that didn’t match either the label or the spreadsheet that generated the label.

After a bit of research, I discovered that my spreadsheet didn’t have the serial number anywhere. It wasn’t a case of scrambled spreadsheet or incorrectly merged labels. I wondered that if a computer could forget its serial number (see http://blogs.4j.lane.edu/hochberg_m/2009/05/26/serial-number-imac-emac/ ), could it scramble the serial number?

I reran the ARD report and this time it reported the correct serial number. I checked my original report and discovered a quirk. Even though I ran the report for a group of computers, it showed the wrong report date for the computer with the wrong serial number.

Why or how it showed the wrong collection date for just one computer when all them were collected in the same report, I don’t know. I do know that I will be a lot less trusting and more cautious when working with ARD report data.

I did a quick check on my master spreadsheet and discovered a total of seven computers with odd collection dates.

Time to add another thing to the to-do list!

Our schools have “Cow Herders,” students who give up one recess a week to learn about the COWs, laptops, printers, and other technology. There are two teams of Cow Herders, one from each school. Their primary responsibility is to take care of the COWs, moving them, cleaning them, and trouble shooting connection and printing problems. They are a great group of kids and I wanted them to have something a little more than an ordinary award certificate. Here’s what they got instead:

The student’s certificates have their name printed above the picture of a computer. I used the CD label portion of The Print Shop 2 program to create the labels. 8D It has a merge feature too!

Here’s how I printed the labels for our computers. If you already have the serial numbers in a spreadsheet, you can skip steps 1-3.

1. Use ARD to get a report for each computer. The report needs to include the serial number. You can include as much or little information as you would like. As this is the hardest part of the process, I get all the information as I don’t want to do it again. I can use this report for many other things so it is very worthwhile.
2. Export the report and open it in Excel. It’s well formatted so I just click on “finish” immediately.
3. I made a working copy of the spreadsheet and deleted any columns I didn’t need for this project.
4. I used the spreadsheet to figure out the MID for each computer and added it as a new column.
5. Now I added two more columns: one for the OS and one for the Base Image.
6. Once those were done, I saved and closed the file.
7. I opened MS Word and used the label and data merge tools to create the labels for each computer.

Here’s a sample of the label. I included the “Info 1” field as that will be our local name for the computer. This will make it much easier to be sure that I have the right label on each computer too.

Another end-of-the-year, get-ready-for-next-year challenge: making sure that everyone understands

• that a “Calendar” is a program that manages events and activities
• that a “Calendar template” is not a program but something that is a part of another program, something put on top of a blank document, like blankets on a bed.

A word processor or spreadsheet can have a “calendar template” but it is not a “Computer Calendar” even if it is on a computer. You can share the document and let others make changes but it is still not a “Computer Calendar.” You can’t have events that repeat each week without putting them in each day.

A calendar program, like iCal, Google Calendar, or the calendar within Outlook, can repeat events, skip dates, categorize events, assign them to individuals and much, much more.

We just had a panic because they couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t see someone’s calendar in 4J Google Calendar. It turned out that the “calendar” was a spreadsheet with a calendar template applied to it. Yes, it looked like a printed calendar. Yes, it was a calendar on a computer. No, it wasn’t a “computer calendar” anymore than a typewriter is a word processor.

Sometimes things look alike but have different meanings. For example, a “bat” can be a piece of sports equipment or an animal.  Whatever you do, don’t use the wrong one when you are trying to hit a ball!

The same is true with computers, especially in word processing. Look at these two rectangles.

They both look alike: solid yellow rectangles with a black border. But they are not the same. One is an “object box,” a shape that can be moved, recolored, or resized. Think of it as a building block. It’s great for design work,  but you can’t write with a building block. You can’t even click inside it.
The other rectangle is a “text box,” a solid yellow rectangle with a black board. You can move, recolor, or resize it. You can do everything with it that you can with an “object box” plus you can do one thing more: you can type inside of it.

Here’s what it looks like when you type inside a text box.

Notice the line at the end of the sentence. That is the “insertion point,” the place where the typing will appear. When you first click inside a text box, the insertion point is in the upper left corner.
Whenever you move a text box, the writing inside it moves too. You can even change the color of box and the words stay the same.

If you type in front of an object box, it might look like the words are inside the box but when you move the box, the words don’t move.

When I moved the box but the words stayed behind.

How do you know which one you are creating? A text box icon usually has a letter A or T in it. If you hover your mouse over it, it will say “text box.”

Text boxes and object boxes. Don’t mix them up. You’ll save yourself a lot of frustration.