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This week was the first of the BCPS summer schedule, Monday through Thursday, with 11 and 12 month employees working 10 hour days.  On paper that sounds awesome, a three day weekend, and getting your 40 hour work-week in.  Well, I completed this four day work week.  

And... I. AM. TIRED.  

It didn't help that I forgot to turn my 4:50am alarm off, and was wide awake this morning well before sunrise.  However, its after 10am now, and I've had my coffee and shower, and I'm feeling alive. 

This week has been productive, successful, and exhausting!  The team of Instructional Tech Facilitators had been assigned the task of setting up all the school/grade level sets of iPads with Apple Configurator in an effort to get them managed by Filewave.  

We met Monday morning at Salem Elementary to get started with a cart of 30 iPads.  This was a teaching/learning session in which a team of all the ITFs serving the elementary schools worked together.  We successfully got this cart set up, supervised by Apple Configurator, and got Filewave and all apps installed in about four hours.  We then went to Mull Elementary where we had 2 carts of brand new iPads.  These proved to be....interesting.  We got some of the oddest error messages, settings about iMessage being used, when we had restricted access on the Master backup... Just craziness.  This sure took the wind out of our sails, as the errors were completely unexplainable...a phenomenon we'd run into all week, seemingly unexplainable errors.  

Once Mull was back in working order, Donna and I went to WAYE to get a small set of 15 set up.  We didn't run into any big messes with this set, thankfully. Ran through the steps, and then did a lot of waiting for updating, and loading apps.

On Tuesday we split up into teams to conquer more schools in less time!  I felt pretty confident in the process, as I had done 2 carts on my own before this week, so Donna and I worked together at Oak Hill while Teresa and Danny went to Valdese, with Debbie doing major work at Liberty Middle for the Summer Enrichment Camp.  As a team we were able to finish Oak Hill, Valdese, Drexel, Liberty Middle, and part of Icard.

Wednesday we completed East Burke Middle, Icard, Rutherford College. Thursday we took care of Mountain Crest, and then the whole team worked at Chesterfield, with major goofy issues.

In all of this, no two schools had the same set up of devices, all were in various states of iOS software updates.  No set up went without some sort of learning curve.  We started the week with a document more than 10 pages in length with out of order directions, handwritten notes, and screen shots, and ended the week with a 1 page document of detailed, wonderful directions (thanks Donna).   

This week the strengths of our team members were highlighted!! 
  • Detail-oriented
  • Editor
  • Tenacious
  • Stubborn
  • Reflective
  • Energetic
  • Hard-Working
  • Supportive
  • Observant
  • Decision maker
  • Team-player
  • Able to get ready for work, and get to work in under 15 minutes
  • Able to take care of teammates
Job well done ITFs!


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Comments

  1. Donna WellsJune 20, 2014 at 9:47 AM

    Great week and I learned (at least) 25 things everyday! Couldn't have made it without the chocolate, the laughter, and our amazing team!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dr. HoneycuttJune 25, 2014 at 1:04 PM

    Great Job Team:)

    ReplyDelete

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