itschad

Let me give you my two cents on it. This is what I did and what helped me however every situation is unique. I got out of school and right away had 5 interviews and was able to get one job offer. I took that job thinking that it was my dream job. I soon realized it wasnt the field for me. So here I was with a programming degree specialized in video games. I thought I would walk into any business programming or repaied based and they would be fighting over me....Boy I was wrong. I applied at many programming companies, had many many interviews. In most cases even a second interview. However, companies didnt like me because I programmed video games. I had one even say "We program serious things here, we dont make play things". Anyways, I moved to where I currently lived because I saw a need for an honest computer repair business. I had a little savings, and my girlfriend had a decent job. We discussed it and decided to give it a go. It was a ton of sacrifice. I think there were days I didnt go home. However, I ran a decent business. Some months were amazing the next were slow. However I think if you took what I made and make it a salary I was making less than 8 dollars an hour. What I earned from it though was amazing. When I ran my business there were months that were slow and some were hectic. I knew I needed a bachelors degree to be considered for a good paying job and I set out to earn that as well. I wont lie it was extremely tough to mange your time of your life/work/school however it was possible and a sacrifice I made. I graduated within a couple years with my degree. I then applied for jobs again and got the very first job I applied for which was a good job. The schooling wasnt even the biggest thing I achieved. The ability to run a some what successful business is a training course no school can offer. You may think your repair abilities are grand, but I guarantee you will learn more and gain some business skills that will help with any job you take int he future. If you choose to start a business do the following: Look up business plans and create one. Do a SWOT analysis. Remember residential computer repairs will help you some months, but that wont be your bread and butter. Try to get service contracts with business's. Be fair and do good work. Never charge to much, or to little. If you charge to little people will often not even consider you. Any way it goes I wish you the best of luck!

Thanks for the replies. Here is what we have, each year we hire high school students to preform preventive maintenance and re image every computer that we have. We build our images very restrictive with the exception of allowing flash drives. We use Compuguard (Like deepfreeze). We give teachers ab tutor to monitor rooms and local admins to their computers. Its hard to lock them down. We use a work order system currently. However, the current system for reporting problems has a few flaws we are going to correct this next school year. Currently we have a tech contact at each school (Teacher with extra contract) they basically just report problems to us. So every teacher reports to them then they report to us. This helps with the things being unplugged or bad keyboard type things. However, we constantly deal with the "Its not worked for months, and I reported it" and then I check the system and nothing is there. They claim they gave the tech contact the information. As far as teachers go, I tell my guys to handle them professionally but not to take anything from them. They do their best however constantly being berated by the teachers, usually one out of ten give us a hard time,I think bothers the guys because they feel bad they cant fix things. I am an ex programmer and scripting saves us in alot of ways. However I am all about automation. I would love some ideas for software that you think might help.

I run a school system where I have 2 guys that work for me. I have 13 schools, and 4 other administrative sites we take care of. We have roughly 5000 computers. I used to be able to help them with repairs but in the last year my job has been pure chaos. We have introduced a LAN/Server Farm/Every Student Username. Is there some magic pill I am missing out on, to help alleviate this. I tried to get help but they say no money is available. At this point, I tell my guys we are only human and can only do so much each day and it will be there tomorrow. However, they are like me and want to fix everything right away. So needless to say morale is down. We have teachers reporting us to our Superintendent and he is well aware we are short handed and does not usually even read the emails. However, he does not see hiring another technician as a possibility with the economy and budget cuts we have had. This and they are sending all of our testing online which means the months of January/February/March/April we have to assist with this. I am just curious if anyone has found something to keep morale high for both staff and teachers. We work as hard as we possibly can yet its never enough. I mean my guys probably work at least 2 hours late (Unpaid) every night. I also will say this, I think some of this is our fault but we refuse to let ourselves get behind in technology. When I started things were horrible, money had been wasted and we were way below the curve. Next year I am going to do my best to prevent anything new from being added to our list of things. However, my plans only matter so much ;p This may be more of a rant than a question. However I really am just curious of how other people do it. How did you convince them you needed help? How do you keep morale high? How do you keep teachers on your side?

Hello, I love this site. I would love to share the adventure and what we have in my school system. My school district has 13 schools, and 5 various other administrative sites. We are geographically a very large district. I think we have something like 45 miles between our furthest sites. In our county we have roughly 3500 computers. Just like everyone else we are ridiculously understaffed. I have 2 techs that work with me and we must take care of all 3500 computers and tons of individual software. I have to manage all network devices, servers, and user accounts, web pages, work management, project planning and still try to help out with the work orders as I can. Also we work for our district. I am really fighting to get us a tech at our larger school. The travel alone takes up most of our time. This year we put in over 150 smart boards and projectors. We have tried 3 different interactive white boards and really like the Smart boards over any of them. We are especially looking forward to the new smart board update. In our elementary school, and special education classrooms we like to use interactive white boards. In our middle schools and high schools we like to use Interwrite Tablets. By this time next year about 85% of our classrooms will have projector and some sort of interactive board, as well as classroom responders. We run Windows XP, on all of our systems and Server 2003 on all servers. We are currently using office 2003, and are about to upgrade to 2007 this summer. We are very hesitant before making changes like this. Each summer we hire about 10 kids to help us do preventive maintenance like clean, and reimage all computers in our district. When I started here 3 years ago, we had a very bad team(Not their fault were just promoted from within and had no clue about the job they were taking). Since then we have cleaned the office out and I now have 2 new team mates who I couldnt do it without. When I first started, we couldnt do wrong. I would fix something that had been broken for over a year and people would jump and praise my name. Now when we fix things the next week, we are cursed for not being there earlier. My work day is supposed to be from 8:00 am - 4:00pm, most days I work till at least 5:00. However, at least once a week I work until 8:00 pm. I am sure many people can relate to the feeling that no matter how hard you work your always behind. However, with all that said I love my job. I worked as a video game programmer before taking this job and I just couldn't stand the thought that I was working so hard to make someone else a ton of money. Now I make a good bit less than I did then, but the thought that my job has more meaning is what inspires us. I just realized how huge of a post this is but I wanted to give some details about things. I would love to compare things with you guys. For some more info on our county, we had a magazine do an article on us a year ago or so: Curriculum-Based Reform :: West Virginia : July 2007 : THE Journal

This is exactly how we had it setup. We entered //ServerName/Students/School/Grade/%username% There were no errors or problems reported. I have done this same thing in the past and never had this problem. I thought maybe I had missed a step. I would change the permissions, however, I am uncertain what I would change them to. Since the permissions appear to be correct to me.

I created student folders for my students to logon.I thought I set the permissions right. Anyways, I just tested one, and the students get their folder mapped as planned. However, I then connected to the server and browsed, while logges on as a student I could get to the other students directories and delete, and write to their folders. I have the permissions on each folder set to as follows: Username(Whatever it is) : Full Control Administrators : Full Control System : Full Control HomeDirectoryServer\Users: Read Execute List Files Am I missing something or some reason why students can see other students folders and files? Thanks, Chad

I have thought of many different softwares. I guess my biggest question is the hardware. Should I buy a really large server, or a large network drive array? Chad

I use a very similar vbs script and it works very well. I use it based on a machine name, and what I do is create what I call "zones". Each zone prints to a unique printer. So what I do is use the 5th letter of the name to put in a letter like A or B or C. So I do it like this |School Name| Zone Letter| Room| Computer Number|. An example of this in use at a school named unionpoint, and in zone b would be: unioB252-3. The script I uses reads the 5th letter and attaches the printer based off of that.

Hello, I am working on setting up a pretty major backup systrem (In my opinion). We currently have 14 sites, I think 19 servers last count. We have over 15 TB's in use currently and within 3 years I would expect it to double. All of our servers are setup up in a raid 5. In the past, before the WAN, we had a computer with a 500gb hard drive and we would back up each site. Today I had the perfect storm. A power failure caused 2 hard drives to go bad in the server thus destroying the raid. Then the backup computer, had a sata drive go bad over the summer somehow. I believe due to a school tech installing a new dvd burner in the backup system. All this 1 day after school opens. I am still dumbfounded about my luck and the way all this happened but it helped me realize two things. One, I need a backup I can depend on, in a secondary site. I also dont want to have to depend on anyone else to do the backup. I would like to find a backup that I can setup in our central office. Then go to a secure place at one of our sites and setup a backup of the servers at our central office. We have 100mb lines between our office and each school. I am also cheap....Really Really Really Really cheap. To be honest this wasnt in our initial plan for this year so I am having to fit it in the budget. Plus, I feel like in education we have to be creative, that I owe it to the students to try to find the best bang for my buck. I used to be a programmer before working in the school system and have thought about writing a small program or even a script and buying winrar console and setting something like that up. I would love any ideas that anyone has, any suggestions and any success or failure stories. Thank you! Chad

Wow, thanks everyone for all the thoughts. I think G-Net is the way to go, it does slightly sound like big brother is watching or something. They accuse me of being big brother anyways, may as well live up to the reputation

I am in West Virginia, about 4 hours south west of Washington DC. I am thinking Campus Greenbrier? To long? G-Net? Its short and easy to say?

Mine is for a whole district. Greenbrier is the district. Thank you for the response. I think I found a new place to consume my time.

Hello everyone, I just stumbled upon this site while doing a search on Google. I saw it and said "I have to join". Its nice to see people sharing the same frustrations as I do. As evil as that may sound. I work in the states and have been working all day on finishing up a new intranet for our school system. Now I have a problem, and my brain is fried. I need a name for it. Its a basic intranet portal where users will login to have access to forms, a district calendar, files, techtorials, project based learning lessons, links to student folders. The whole deal. However its missing a name. As crazy as this may sound, in my district without it, there may be flames and ashes left. We are the oldest district in my state and we have many teachers who fear change of any kind. Any ideas? Also, any suggestions for things that I should definitely put on the site to encourage teacher participation? Thanks a bunch in advance, Chad