Technology in Education Frustration

It must be the end of May. My tolerance for, well anything outside of the daily norm is extremely low. Let's just say I have a full plate of personal stress and that has to be factored in to my demeanor. That aside, being in the business of technology and education everyday brings its own basket of stresses to the table. The root of which is the forced situation of trying to provided technology with little or no budget. So get ready for another list - a list of... well I guess things you deal with.

1. MS Office & its many versions
   This is huge, especially this time of year with projects due. You have a presentation. You work on it in class but need more time so you bring it home with you on your USB jumpdrive. **Editors note** this is actually the making of 2 problems in that one little sentence - it will be addressed in point 2. You work tirelessly at home on this presentation, making sure to include eye pleasing transitions & fonts then save it dutifully to your jumpdrive. Days pass and finally it is time to present. You load up your presentation at school only to find that it is not working right; the timing is off, the transitions are gone and the fonts are ARIAL of all things. Enter the tech guy - "what happened?" inquires the student. Well you see there are different versions of PowerPoint and with the newer versions come new bells / whistles (no new advancement in the software just fluff - but thats neither here nor there). The school cannot afford to buy licensing for MS Office everytime a new transition arrives so we have a 6 year old product. Since you just recently bought your home pc / software it has the latest greatest transitions. Now you can take your old .ppt and it will work wonderfully in the new, but going backwards will strip your presentation without warning. You can go download the viewer from microsoft, but you will be logged in as a student so nevermind you won't be able to install it. So create 2 copies of your presentation (like you have the time) one that is full featured and the other generic, right? Yea, right.


2. USB removable media & network drives
   Remember in the above when said student saved their work to the jumpdrive? Let's revisit that little scenario and play out scene 2a as it would have happened. Student logs into the school network ***editors note** due to our network drives and the letters assigned by someone other than myself this problem is constent. Ok, so student logs in, plugs in the usb drive and nothing happens. Unplug and try again, same result. Enter tech guy - who attempts to explain why this is to people that don't care, just fix it. Well try disconnecting from the first alphabetical network drive; Oh wait you don't have permission. Well assign the usb drive a new letter; oh wait not only do you not have persmission, well lets just leave it at that. I will be down. Repeat this process X times for every new drive used in class. Leading me to the opinion that using mobile labs (laptop) either setup your network drives leaving some alphabetical spaces to allow for removable media or don't log onto the local machine only and not the network.

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