Fife Schools Technology

Need help understanding what your teen is texting? Having a hard time deciphering the alphabet soup of acronyms?

Try DTXTR (short for detexter, like decipher but for texting) at http://www.lgdtxtr.com/ .

It’s a translator where you can type in a “texting” phrase and you’ll be given the meaning.

There’s even reverse translation but not all common phrases translate into text-speak so it’s hit and miss.

Give it a try!

TTFN

I tool a look at our spam filter statistics today to see how hard we are getting hit with attempted spam. Below are the stats for incoming email over the past month or so. Everything in the spam count column was blocked by our filters. Overall, our spam filter is working well. We have relatively few false positives or false negatives.

Pixlr is a very nice online photo editor. It’s not Photoshop but most people don’t need a $600 program to edit their photos.

Give it a try at http://pixlr.com/ .

Starting sometime during the night, Hedden lost its network connection to the district and beyond. Qwest believes it is a failed piece of hardware used by their fiber optics.

This affected Internet, email, and a few other services for Hedden.

Connectivity should be restored soon.

We apologize for any inconveniences.

Update: Qwest finished the repairs and the network is back up.

In an effort to conserve resources (dollars and environmental), we are making steps towards technologies that will help us to reduce costs and to use less energy and materials.

Virtualization is a computer technology that allows multiple computers or servers to run on the same hardware. So, for example, we can take three servers and “virtualize” them, allowing all three servers to run on a single piece of hardware but still act as three separate servers.

Imagine if your family had one car but three family members could use that one car at the same time to go different places. You would spend less than if you purchased three cars, spend less on fuel, etc. That’s a little like what virtualization can do in the computer world.

As a result, we can reduce costs by needing less hardware, less electrical power, less air conditioning to keep server rooms cool, etc. It’s also easier to manage virtual servers in the long run.

We’re also looking at ways to create virtual desktops and virtual applications. This would allow us to use smaller, more efficient, and less expensive computers in classrooms yet still deliver the power students and teachers need for their classwork.

In future posts, I’ll give some specifics about how we are doing this. 

Kris Haines, teacher at Endeavour, discovered a nice website to assist with spelling practice. I wanted to pass it on.

www.spellingcity.com

Includes a function that speaks the spelling words.

I’d like to hear feedback on how this site works for teachers and students.

 Using a RSS reader? Now you can get grades from GradeChecker delivered via RSS. This means that whenever a grade is updated by a teacher, the RSS feed with that updated grade will be delivered to your RSS reader. You don’t need to visit the GradeChecker site to check grades.

To use the RSS feed, visit the GradeChecker site and do a search for your grades. Then at the bottom of the results page, there will be a link to your custom RSS feed. Cut and past that link into your RSS reader and that’s it.

This is still in beta because I’m not sure if all readers will work correctly. Please give me feedback if you find any problems.

We often receive tech help requests where someone is not able to login, access an application, reach files on their My Documents, etc.

The first thing to try is to restart your computer.

It may sound simple but it is often overlooked.

For a number of reasons, your computer may have lost its network connection to a server or other network location. Restarting the computer usually restores those connections automatically.

If you try that and the problem continues, please contact us for assistance.

This Sunday (Feb. 22), Tacoma Public Utilities will be doing some work on the electric power at the district office. As a result, all computer related services will be down throughout most of the day. The scheduled work time is from 8am to 5pm.

This outage includes:

• website
• portal
• email
• in-district logins and home directories at the ESC and FHS
• voicemail
• other potential services as well

While staff should be able to use their computers at all schools (other than FHS) on Sunday (should you need to come in to work), there may be some services that are not available.

For some, especially in tough economic times, purchasing software to use at home may not be an option. Fortunately, there are free alternatives. Here are some:

OpenOffice ( http://www.openoffice.org ) is a free suite of programs similar to Microsoft Office. It includes word processing, spreadsheet, drawing, and presentation software. OpenOffice should provide many of the tools a student would need to do work at home on a computer.

Another “office” alternative online is Google Docs ( http://docs.google.com ). There aren’t as many features as the desktop applications but does provides the basics via the web.

Photoshop is the industry standard for image editing but it comes at a price. A free alternative that provides much of the same functionality is called GIMP ( http://www.gimp.org ). It’s a powerful tool for editing photos or creating graphics from scratch.