School

Everything relating to stuff that happens at school

HP Chromebook 14 G5 Trackpad Failure

I have a fleet of about 200 HP Chromebook 14 G5’s that I manage at my job (among other models of machines) and I’ve been having this common fault with the trackpads where they will stop working or stutter around. I thought it was an interesting problem so I’ve decided to document it a bit more in detail here.

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Posted by duck, 5 comments

Rubber Band Cars STEM Project

About the project

This is a project I worked on with a group of students at both the schools I work at. The original goal was to have the students at both schools build the cars then meet up and talk about their cars and have races to see whose car can go the furthest. Sadly COVID-19 resulted in us being unable to meet up, but we still built them and had in school races anyway!
The basic principle is the Rubber Band cars are planned on paper, designed in TinkerCAD on the computer and then 3D Printed and assembled by the students.
A little bit of background on me:  I’m the Technology Officer in two primary schools and I’ve been doing this job for 11 years now. My background is in IT and I’m a tech enthusiast – I’ve done a bit of everything! I’m not actually a qualified teacher, so I do my planning alongside the teacher who I’m working with to make sure that it ticks all the boxes.

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Posted by duck in Intermediate, School, 2 comments

Firefly 2019

In August 2019 we ran an event at my Primary School called the Firefly Arts Festival.
It was a one night event where we show off artwork created by the kids as well as an art installation by each year level, most of the installations featured light.
For a quick summary of the night, watch this video!

For more details, read on…

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Posted by duck in School, 0 comments

Fixing a Barcode Reader Trigger

A few years ago I bought a barcode reader for use in a school Library. It was a Cino 780BT, Bluetooth, nice base station, glorious battery. It was a really nice unit.
One slight issue: The trigger switch on them sucks.  The first one we warrantied and got a replacement, the second one developed the same fault after a year or so of use too. The first time it happened the switch had come loose from the board, so I resoldered it back on (it’s a SMD switch, so there wasn’t much holding it on).
I contacted the company, they wanted me to send it back to them to fix (and charge me for it), the switch would be $20 + labour to fit it. I figured since it was out of warranty I’d give it a shot and see if I could replace it.

I couldn’t find a decent switch to fit (I tried to repurpose a switch from a mouse, but I couldn’t get it to fit right), so I used a switch from my Mechanical Keyboard sampler kit (it has 4 different types of switches to try out to see which one you like).

So: Little bit of soldering and some hot glue later, I have a working barcode reader again!IMG_1432

Read More to see some in progress pictures!

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Posted by duck in Home, How-To Guides, School, 2 comments

ClickView Review

UPDATE: This article is over 10 years old! ClickView has changed a lot since then, moved to an all online format with a completely different pricing structure.  I’m leaving the article up for posterity, but you’ll have to find a different review to see what it’s like now.

We signed up for this service called ClickView which allows us to stream videos to any machine on the school network. The idea is quite good, they worry about the Copyright (as long as you get their videos) and all you have to do is install the software on your server, load in the videos and then install the client on all the machines you want to use it on.
It hasn’t all been without issues though, here’s my experiences with it:
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Posted by duck in Reviews, School, 10 comments

Headphones in Schools

We have many sets of headphones, one for every machine infact, that’s over 120 sets of headphones. Every day they cop a lot of abuse, from kids chewing the cables to the fluffy bits on the ears being destroyed.

When you’re looking for headphones to use in a school environment, there’s a lot of things you need to take into consideration, see below to find out what I’ve discovered from my investigations into headphones.

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Posted by duck in IT Issues, Reviews, School

Novell Deploy Error D018

Here is a quick guide to fixing the error that occurs when you’re trying to open a NAL Object via Novell, the Error ID is D018.

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Posted by duck in How-To Guides, IT Issues, School