The "S" Word

Streaming is kind of a touchy subject. I've had a lot of people ask me why it’s such a big deal if they want to stream something from YouTube for their classroom, and to be completely honest… it isn't.

What makes it a big deal is when everyone wants to stream from YouTube and Spotify and Pandora and Vevo and Google Play and iTunes and Netflix and Amazon Prime all at once and all the time. Add in the fact that the students are streaming music and videos all on their own in practically every lab in the school system, and you might start to see why it becomes an issue.

The reason that it’s a big deal is pretty simple. At home, you pay your ISP a certain amount of money each month for a certain amount of bandwidth. It's probably plenty for you and your family, and you never top it out. That’s essentially what we do as a school system, only instead of paying Charter or Comcast we pay Alabama Supercomputer in Huntsville, and we have the capability to use way more than our limit.

The old metaphor about the internet being the "information superhighway" is equally cheesy and -- as much as this hurts me -- accurate. When we get online, we get in our digital car and we head out on the road.

Here’s where the analogy gets weird, though.

Say you’re not doing much online… maybe checking your email or the weather so you'll know how much milk and bread to buy, for example. At that point, you’re driving a smart car on the highway. You’re not taking up much room, you're just minding your own business doing your thing. Now, imagine an entire class of students has just pulled up YouTube in a lab. Your smart car is now competing with 30 semi-trucks that want that same piece of highway. The road isn't getting any wider; you've just got to share it and find some way to fit. Everything slows down, and in the end no one is getting anywhere.

That’s essentially why we limit and/or discourage streaming. It’s certainly useful when it’s needed; those trucks on the highway are frequently carrying lots of important stuff. The problems start when everyone is driving one. There’s just no room for anyone to get around, and ultimately, traffic grinds to a halt. The difference between the internet and the interstate is that often instead of blaming all the people driving around in those huge trucks… the road just gets blamed for not being wide enough.

In a perfect world, we'd live without bandwidth limitations, speed limits, and calories. Until that day comes, though, try to do what you can to make sure that you and your class aren't a gang of truckers. If you want some advice on how to limit the amount you need to stream for your classes, let us know and we'll be glad to give you some advice. If everyone shares the road, we can all drive that much faster.

Erik Hammonds is a computer tech for the Tuscaloosa City Schools.

Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites

A lot of people are afraid of computers. They don’t want to use them, or interact with them, or even be in the same room with them. They’ll cross the street if one approaches them on the sidewalk. They may even be uneasy around technology in general. Some of people with that fear of the digital world can probably remember a time when the flashing 12:00 on the VCR taunted them, like a phantasmal beacon in the night daring them to press buttons.

It knows things!

In talking with some people that have admitted to being wary of computers, I’ve found the answer to the question “What are you afraid of?” has most often been “That I’ll break something.”

“I’ll mess something up.”

“I’ll click the wrong thing and it won’t go.”

Well… yeah. You’re probably going to do that. Chances are, if you get in there and play with the software on a computer, at some point you’re more than likely going to break it. Suddenly it won’t boot. Windows won’t load. Office is gone. Your default browser has been set to (gasp!) Internet Explorer. There’s a litany of things that could and probably will go wrong.

So?

How else are you going to figure out how to do stuff? Personally, I’m a kinetic learner. At a very young age I learned how our VCR worked… by completely dismantling it. I got in a little trouble, but thankfully it was hard for my parents to get mad at my curiosity. Along those same lines, if you play around with your computer and you do manage to break something, what’s the worst thing that could happen? The entire tech department will not -- contrary to popular opinion -- burst into your classroom astride our fiery warhorses, donning tattered ebon robes and demanding your very soul.

It would look like this if we did, though. That would be cool.

The first thing we'll do is fix it, which automatically puts you ahead of my parents because they had to buy a new VCR. There's nothing you can do that we can't fix. I've said that time and time again, and it's still as true as it's ever been. The worst thing that can happen is that we'll have to re-image your computer. Since you save all your documents to your h: drive (RIGHT?) then you've not really lost anything at all, have you? Once we figure out what happened, we can talk about why it happened and hopefully help you get whatever result you were going for. Remember... we're here to help you teach those kids. Don't be afraid to ask for our help in getting that done, and don't be afraid to strike out on your own to see what you can do. It'll all be okay, I promise.

Model varies by location.

"There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them." - André Gide

Erik Hammonds is a computer tech for the Tuscaloosa City Schools.

Malware: What It Is and Why You Have It

A computer is just a box of circuits, transistors, resistors and other electrical engineering words. Left to its own devices, you can’t really do anything with it. You need software, right? Of course you do! Luckily, the internet is full of software, and a lot of it says it’s free in big red letters! Isn't that great?!

No. That is not great.

Here’s the thing… most of the time, that “free” software is going to be a timed trial. You can use it a certain number of days or hours, and then it wants you to purchase the full version.  Even worse, most of those programs are bundled with installers that will add several different programs to your computer that you didn't ask for. Those programs are often harmful to your computer, and are what we call “malware”.

Malware is actually a portmanteau… it’s short for “malicious software”. The actual definition of malware is “software that is intended to damage or disable computers and computer systems”. Those programs that you may have seen pop up wanting your credit card number to fix several thousand errors in your registry? Random things opening when you try to start up your favorite Internet browser that should never, ever be Internet Explorer? Yep, that’s malware.

Getting rid of malware isn't always easy (though sometimes it totally is; it depends on what’s on the computer and what you're willing to lose). The easiest thing to do is to just not get it in the first place! With this stuff sneaking its way onto your computer when you're trying to download innocent-looking software from reputable sites (even CNET is guilty of distributing the stuff now) how can you avoid it? How do you know if that file you want to download is safe or not?

ASK US FIRST.

That’s the best piece of advice I can give you. Put in a work order and let us know that you’re interested in a program, and where you found it online. We can download it and try it out first to make sure it’s safe. If it’s not, we'll let you know and might be able to suggest a similar, safer program that will do what you need to get done.

Work Orders and You

When you come across a computer problem and you need some help, what’s the first thing you do? No, I mean after you swear at it and sigh in disgust. Right, you put in a work order! That’s the signal flare in the sky that tells us you need us to come and take a look at something that isn’t working.

It’s really more than that, though.

Work orders are the way that you can communicate with us about problems that you’re having. When you put in a work order, the more you can tell us, the faster we can get it fixed. I’ve had some experience in elementary schools being referred to as “the computer doctor,” and that’s actually a really good way to look at it.

When you go to the doctor and they ask you what’s wrong, you don’t just say “It hurts.” You tell them what hurts, when it started, what aggravates it, what you’ve done on your own to try to alleviate the pain, any history you may have… all manner of things, right? So sticking with the medical metaphor, let me give you an example.

“I can’t log in.”

Okay, to what? What error message are you getting? Are you on a desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, Chromebook? Novell? iNow? Groupwise? Those are all important details that could help us get you back up and running much faster if we had them.

“I can’t log in to Groupwise. It’s prompting me for a password, but I’ve never had to enter one at school before. None of the passwords I know will work.”

Just from those three sentences, I know that you’re logged in “Computer Only” and that nothing’s going to work quite right for you. That little bit of extra info was all I needed to diagnose exactly what your problem is, and I can immediately respond in the work order and tell you how to fix it, which, for the record, is to log out, click on the “Log in to Novell Network” link, and log back in.

Don’t be afraid to put too much in there. There’s no character limit, and everything helps. Something that you might not think matters might be the exact thing we need to diagnose the problem and get you fixed. Like they used to say on those GI Joe PSAs that ran when I was a kid, “Knowing is half the battle!”

Erik Hammonds is a computer tech for the Tuscaloosa City Schools.