Thursday, August 17, 2006

Hello, all.

Apologies in advance for a long email at a busy time . . .

If you're getting this email, then Jama has given me your name as a teacher assigned to one of our four laptop classrooms. If this is the first you've heard about laptop rooms, you should check out previous announcements at the Laptop Ready Resources site (http://abjohnson.iweb.bsu.edu/laptopready) (scroll down for archived announcements from this summer). You may also want to take a look at the classroom help sheets in the right hand column on this page (http://abjohnson.iweb.bsu.edu/laptopready/Links.html).

Good news first:

** The student desks are here and set up, and we ought to have all ports and plugs activated before the end of the week.
** All major classroom tech equipment is in and working in all four classrooms.
** The two new rooms, RB 106 and 107, have locking cabinets whose locks are a match for your office-door keys. (Meaning: you have the key to the cabinet. It's the same as your office key.)
** Sandy bought us cool looking blue staplers, so each laptop room has a stapler. (A small thing, but useful. And blue.)
** And a big thing: Rather than the 17 Tablet PCs we initially anticipated receiving, we'll be receiving 30, which means we'll be in good shape for
supplying computers to every teacher assigned to a laptop classroom this semester.

And then some bad news:

** It looks at this point as if the new Tablet PCs won't be arriving this week. And I can't say when they'll be arriving, because Gateway is being unhelpful. With good luck, we'll have them to you in about a week. In the meantime, I'll make sure that we have laptops to use in each of the classrooms; you'll just need to bring your files (on USB drive or CD) or upload them to iLocker. I'm very sorry about this. And the folks at UCS are sorry. (Ironically, the only people not sorry are the sorry people at Gateway who couldn't get our order out in time.) (In their defense, it sounds like there were some real technical difficulties with the bodies of the machines, and I'm glad they didn't send them out broken.)
** It's possible that the rolling teacher stations we ordered for RB 106 and 107 won't arrive this week. If they don't, we'll leave the big old-style teaching tables in 106 and 107, at least until the teacher stations arrive.
** And one more potential issue. The new card readers on the doors of RB 106 and 107 are nicer than the old ones on the rest of our doors. But programming them requires some new super-secure keying software that Chris Elliott hasn't yet received from foot-dragging Best Lock. That means we may have some issues with getting into 106 and 107 during the first week of school. If you arrive to 106 or 107 and are locked out, someone in the office can let you in. If you're teaching in 106 or 107, please do your best to wait for the next instructor to arrive before leaving, so that we never have to shut the door. But if no teacher arrives and you have to go, please pull the door shut; there's less to snatch in these rooms than in our desktop PC-based rooms, but we still need to protect the equipment.

And that's the news. I'll send updates if and when I can.

Fred

PS: If you'd like to check out the new RB rooms before Monday, stop in at the office and ask them to let you in to take a look (or if you really just want to SEE how things are looking, there are pictures here) (http://abjohnson.iweb.bsu.edu/laptopready/See.html). The LA rooms (17s and 20s) are keyed with the old-style card-readers, so if you were set up for card entry last year, you ought to be able to get into 17 or 20 to take a look right now.

PPS: Don't forget about Ethernet cables. (See bottom of this announcement.)

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