Questions on Notice

Sydney Region CC Training Day Term 2 2006

Do you expect that schools buy the products presented during the Industry Presentations at the CC Days? We have many things our feeble budgets must buy already.

No. The purpose of the industry presentations is two-fold:

1. To provide all schools with details about new products that they otherwise may not realise exist

2. To present products that may assist schools to solve a particular problem they may be having or provide them with ideas about how they may be able to do things differently

• There is no expectation of any school that they must purchase any of the products shown and the vendors are always informed they should keep their presentation informative, and not to make it a straight sales pitch.

How to "responsibly" dispose of surplus machines that do not meet minimum standards for the Sydney Region Reconnect Reuse and Recycle program? The big green bin is ever so tempting!

Don't give in to temptation. There are two organisations that have been used in Sydney Region that will dispose of ICT equipment in an environmentaly friendly way. You can contact these organisations for more information: 

Steve Friend MRI (Aust) Pty Ltd 93b Mandoon Road Girraween   NSW   2145 Phone 02 9631 3666 Fax 02 9631 3611 Mobile 0409 44 66 41 OR 

www.itrecyclers.com.au

Year 3 took videos (MPG) on the school digital camera for their home pages on EduWeb works great. Year 6 used the teacher's camera that uses QuickTime (MOV). When they loaded them onto home pages the sound came out but no video. I managed to get it to work on the staffroom ASI PCs but it will not work on the same ASI PCs in year 6. I have loaded the correct version of QuickTime onto the computers and they still wont play. I can play the video in the image folder but not on the home page. Good Luck I have been trying since week 2 term 1.

The standard format that most still cameras that can record video use is MPEG, not MOV. MPEG videos will play in the browser without issues. In order to play MOV correctly, you must install QuickTime Player. BUT! Because you have installed QT Player and it does play the video directly from the folder but not from the browser, it means when you installed the player, you did not tell it to install the QT PLUG-IN for Internet Explorer.

Reinstall the latest QuickTime and choose the option to install the IE Plug-in.

I have lots of problems where students cannot logon with a message "you can not log on to this computer.. please contact administrator for help". And.. "(students' name)'s home folder does not exist. Please contact administrator.” What is the solution? We are a Mac school.

When asking these very specific questions, we need to know more details, such as:

•Does this problem occur on all workstations or only some?

•Does this problem occur with all accounts or only some?

•Does this problem occur all the time or only sometimes?

We would suggest this call be logged to the HelpDesk where it would be allocated, investigated and resolved.

I have a mirror image of our school's web page on our proxy server. It is a pain to keep both current as I have to change the link address for every link on every page. Is this necessary? How can I simplify it?

The reason links aren’t working when you move your website to another location is probably because all of your links are DIRECT links, rather than RELATIVE links.

All websites live in a folder structure. If your link points to a html file which is fully pathed eg.

C:/school website/newsletter/newsjune.htm

Then when you transfer it to the website, people browsing the site are trying to link to a page on their C: drive which does not exist.

Change ALL your links to be RELATIVE links:

newsletter/newsjune.htm – they will work at both sites.

We have several black and white laser printers networked around the school and one colour laser for printing photos etc. We seem to be spending a lot of money replacing colour toner cartridges on the colour laser printer. What is the cheapest way of getting colour printing?

Colour laser printers are definitely the cheapest way of producing colour prints. You didn’t state which brand/model of colour laser you have. Most 4-pass colour lasers cost between 8 - 30 cents per page for 20% colour. But if you are doing full-page photos, you can multiply that by 5. The HP 1500/2500 costs about the same as inkjet. The Samsung CLP550N is around 18 cents @ 20%. The cheapest printers per page are single-pass colour printers such as the HP 4600 ($3,300), the Xerox C1618 ($2,300) or the Kyocera FS-C5030N ($2,300) – these run between 16 and 24 p.p.m.

What can (and can't) we spend the CC's tied grant on? Is it just for RFF or can it be used for any computer related purchases?

This is best answered by referring to the original memo distributed to all schools in 1998:

http://tinyurl.com/qvtnh

Can you show us how to reset student passwords from DET build servers please?

If CC’s at schools with Sydney Region-built servers are not comfortable with doing this themselves or don’t want to, we recommend you email one of the TAs with the details of the student accounts to be changed, or email the HelpDesk at ithelp@det.nsw.edu.au and ask in the email that it be passed onto Sydney Region support. We do not recommend that you ring helpdesk with these types of requests as the requests are not clearly transposed sometimes.

If you really want to learn how to do it yourself, ask a TA to show you. We do not normally do this unless the CC is very confident of their abilities in server management.

Can you show me how to access the schools server from home again? I know you have showed us before but at that stage we had no server and I wasn't interested.

That’s why we put all of our past presentations from CC Days at the Sydney Region website, so these questions need not be asked.

This was detailed in Term 3 during Greg’s session titled:

Using the DET Portal to Access in School Servers

http://tinyurl.com/lf2j5

We are a Mac school. I understand it is possible to set up our school computer network in sync with the other Mac schools in the region and that this can allow for remote monitoring/fixing/updating of our network. Is this true? How do we get it done?

Schools with OSX Servers were entitled to order a free copy Apple Remote Desktop as detailed in a memo to each Mac school and at one of our past CC Days.This software offers some excellent functionality in the areas of desktop and remote management.

Step 1 : Get ARD and your OSX 10.4 upgrades you are entitled to from Software Sales

Step 2: Log a call with DET HelpDesk to arrange for Rob Pucillo to visit to assist with installation and standardisation of your server and network setup.

I have a wonderful spelling program suitable for years 1 to 6 which I cannot use on the network even though it is networkable. Errors show up when the students are logged on but there are no errors when the administrator is logged on. How do I solve it? Please show me slowly how to fix the problem.

• What spelling program?• It sounds like a permissions issue on each workstation, usually relating to a folder on the computer that student users do not have write access to• This will probably need to be fixed on-site. Log a helpdesk call.

Is it alright to place sticky labels onto CDs and DVDs so we can label them with our school name and a barcode no.?

Many schools acquisition every piece of software and DVD movie in OASIS Library. That’s fine. BUT: Sticking the OASIS Library barcode sticker on the CD/DVD is not a good idea. The sticker unbalances the CD/DVD when it rotates. Newer drives spin the disk much faster than older drives. The "standard" 1x speed is 300 rpm. 52x is 15,600 rpm. In order from least serious to most serious, the problems may include:

• Rattling noise when in the drive• Stuttering or Unreadable disks• Complete shattering – millions of pieces, damaging the computer

What do you want us to do with old switches, gizmos etc left behind in boxes after DET upgrading work is done?

DET contractors have been progressively visiting schools and replacing the “blue” Cisco 3550 Router with a newer, better model. The replaced router was reprogrammed by the contractor to turn it into a straight 24-port 10/100 Ethernet switch, therefore it is usable to replace any old hub or smaller switch you may have at your school.

I have no idea what you should do with gizmos.

Why sometimes when a website a student is working on is opened in MS FrontPage do the buttons not show as a graphic? The link is there however the button appears as a white box with a red cross. How do we fix this?

Right-click on the white box and choose Picture Properties. It will show the name and path of the image file it is looking for.

It is very likely that the image file it is looking for is not in the path shown.

Remember also, that websites placed on the Internet are case-sensitive. If the webpage refers to a file called photo.jpg but the actual file is called Photo.jpg, then it will not be found.

Microsoft Publisher has acted slightly strangely when displaying graphics on two of our new ASI rollout computers. Has anyone else experienced the same problem?

This is a problem that some (not all) schools have reported.

•One school said rebooting the PC solved the problem

•One said to reduce the Graphics Acceleration setting in

•Display Properties

•Settings…Advanced…Troubleshoot

•ITD says the 2006 Semester 2 SOE will resolve it.

I liked this session. How do I go about submitting my own “Question on Notice?”

Glad you asked. http://www.sydneyr.det.nsw.edu.au

Sydney Region Website…Support…

Technology…For CCs…

Click the Link on “Questions on Notice”

You can only submit Questions from a school computer as this is a DET Intranet function. Remember, the questions you ask should be ones that would be of interest to other CCs.