May technology be ever in your favor

This week has been stressful on two accounts. One was literally my hotmail account and the other is the robots that we are trying to program in my Gateways to Technology class.

As for the hotmail account, I realized yesterday that someone/somehow I had spammed a bunch of people. I think someone got a hold of my password and started sending out SPAM in my name. I think that is how it all works. I know, I am a technology teacher--but when it gets into acronyms and codes and such, I am absolutely no help. On another note, from the 50 or so people that got SPAM from me, the only one to respond was my father. I thought that was quite humorous.

So, anyway, because of the SPAM issue, my hotmail account got blocked. At first I was thinking, ok, no big deal. I will just change my password. Sadly, I had not updated my email address on my hotmail account--so when I tried to reset it, the email that was on my account was my old AOL account...from 1999. I haven't used that account in over ten years. Funny, my old password still worked on that. I guess it is more proof that I should change my passwords more often.

Yes, I did learn something today.

And now for the robot rant.

We have these VEX kits and we have been working on them since the beginning of February. We have different activities that we need to complete and the kids really seem to like to build different mechanisms.

The next task was to actually start writing programs to make the robots run on their own. I had put in a work order and one of the tech guys came out.  I knew that I needed to get updates in the lab. He said he fixed something, so I took him for his word. (I later realized he half fixed one of the 29 computers in my lab.)

Our district has some serious security features and won't allow downloads of any kind. This is good on one hand, but, bad if you want to download programs to run robots. I spent three days this week trying to troubleshoot to get these robots to work. I had kids write different programs. I tried loading and reloading programs. I had one of my super GT sixth graders work on it for about two hours--but even he couldn't figure it out.

I put in another work order (this is actually work order number FIVE for these issues) and the tech guy is coming back this weekend. But, it seems like it is a download issue and since I don't have administrative privileges, I can't get these dumb robots to work.

On a positive note, my kids did a quickwrite about troubleshooting today. I think every single student understands what it means to troubleshoot because they lived it firsthand...all...week....long.

I really, really, really want to skip the programming bit and start our next unit on energy. I can totally handle energy. This unit doesn't involve running/writing any programs and I don't have to get around firewalls, I think I will be ok.

How many more days of school are left?

Oh, 38. I got this.

May your technology be ever in your favor. (Cause it hasn't been in mine.)