School/Work IT "pros"

[Rhotis]

 

They use the pro version and idle the computers so they know who was logged in from where when and why.  This keeps the teachers from watching porn or the kids from doing something stupid or even just someone from walking in off the street without knowledge of how to break into the system from doing anything on the network.  This is basic network security.  I am surprised your high school uses it,  pleasantly surprised that is.  How does the pro version help them log the users if the normal version can't? I wish they would save the money they spend on Windows Pro (by replacing with linux for free) and use it to get better hardware in the computers. They PCs are overkill for normal use but struggle in the graphics lab where they are pushed. Nobody has ever explained the reasoning behind their choices, so I didn't know that it had to do with network security.

 

Modern tech moves too fast for that level of school to keep up with even in the slightest.  They are teaching you also there to be end users not to be PC technicians or programmers.  Even if they have an intro programming class its going to mostly be busy work at that level.  I can't really expect to be taught programming, but nobody in the class (besides me) is even computer literate. A computer class should be informative and helpful, but after years of that class my classmates are just as clueless as ever to how the computer works, etc.

 

Not everyone is on the yearbook.  Fair point, but everyone who is interested in graphic design usually takes one of the classes in it, so I feel like the class time could be spent more efficiently.

 

When you get to college it will be better but you will have the same basic complaints.  The technology will be behind by a few years like it is at almost every university in the western world unless you get really lucky and get there at the positive end of an upgrade cycle. 

 

Oh and BTW your professors in comp sci will almost uniformly suck.  There is a reason they are teaching class to a bunch of people where a 3rd to a half will never finish the degree and not creating something for a big software company or starting a software company of their own.  That reason is not because they enjoy teaching.  

 

 

Ugh please dont reply like that it makes it uglier to reply back to your reply :P

 

Why does it make it more secure?  Well I hope if they are using Pro they are using a proper network behind it with MS server, domain controllers etc.  Basically its just about account management.  If every user has a unique username.  Now if they are giving generic usernames for classes or for workstations with the dang user/pass labeled on the monitor (I have seen this happen before) that is a different story.  If they have a proper network behind it though it is more secure than using the home versions and having the above mentioned workstation logins.  They can do better account management,  tracking and so forth.  With a proper network and proper administration behind it with the pro version you can also do things like not allow logins between say 6pm and 7am or whatever their needs are based on when people are in school.  

 

No they cannot use linux,  not in a k-12 school and not for standard users.  You will spend more time trying to teach people how to use the interface for software they have never seen than actually doing anything else.  Its also more expensive to maintain.  It costs more to hire a *nix admin team than a windows admin team.  When I was in the network operations world of corporate america (now I run a small consulting company working with end users and small business) my *nix admins made 10-25% more than the windows admins.  You have to remember though specifically in k-12 they are not there to teach kids how to be network engineers.  You are there to learn the basics.  Those of you that are ahead of the curve will just have to accept your easy A if you are in k-12.  

 

Classmates being as clueless as ever -  My guess is if you actually stopped thinking in terms of what you want to learn because you are an enthusiast and possibly considering entering IT as a career and looked at the broader system you might see you are not as correct as you think you are.  I do not know your situation.  I am likely over twice your age and likely one of the older people on the forum here so I am pretty far removed from the education system.  I have done some work for school systems in the past and I refuse all school system work now.  Either they have an IT staff and they do not really need me or they are out to lunch and the politics involved and budgeting involved is more than I care to deal with.  I would imagine though that the people actually are more educated than you think they are but they are just no where near your level.  If they are not enthusiasts or interested in the IT field though thats the way its going to be.  They have to teach to the LCD though,  thats how budgets work.  

 

You would have to lay out the classes more.  I again have been out of school possibly longer than you have been alive.  When I was in school our computer classes consisted of learning to write hello world in BASIC and later in high school was learning to use Lotus 123 and dbase and I think it was an early word perfect but likely was something even more simple for word processing.  It was a 1 semester course and it was considered crazy to even have the class.  I finished the semester coursework in 2 days and went and played in the dark room the rest of the semester (was on the school paper as a photographer).  Anyway thats just to relate how different things were when I was your age,.  You would have to explain what classes you are in and what they do for me to give you a better answer as to why they are that way,.  In the broad term my guess is they are a combination of aimed at the future general office worker rather than someone considering a career in IT.  I remember in HS on the newspaper staff we used macs and used pagemaker which was insane but we had the single best computers in the school us and the yearbook staff and there was no class on the software we just kind of learned it and those of us that took too it did all the page layout for the paper.  

[CornOnJacob]

Ugh please dont reply like that it makes it uglier to reply back to your reply :P

 

Why does it make it more secure?  Well I hope if they are using Pro they are using a proper network behind it with MS server, domain controllers etc.  Basically its just about account management.  If every user has a unique username.  Now if they are giving generic usernames for classes or for workstations with the dang user/pass labeled on the monitor (I have seen this happen before) that is a different story.  If they have a proper network behind it though it is more secure than using the home versions and having the above mentioned workstation logins.  They can do better account management,  tracking and so forth.  With a proper network and proper administration behind it with the pro version you can also do things like not allow logins between say 6pm and 7am or whatever their needs are based on when people are in school.  

 

No they cannot use linux,  not in a k-12 school and not for standard users.  You will spend more time trying to teach people how to use the interface for software they have never seen than actually doing anything else.  Its also more expensive to maintain.  It costs more to hire a *nix admin team than a windows admin team.  When I was in the network operations world of corporate america (now I run a small consulting company working with end users and small business) my *nix admins made 10-25% more than the windows admins.  You have to remember though specifically in k-12 they are not there to teach kids how to be network engineers.  You are there to learn the basics.  Those of you that are ahead of the curve will just have to accept your easy A if you are in k-12.  

 

Classmates being as clueless as ever -  My guess is if you actually stopped thinking in terms of what you want to learn because you are an enthusiast and possibly considering entering IT as a career and looked at the broader system you might see you are not as correct as you think you are.  I do not know your situation.  I am likely over twice your age and likely one of the older people on the forum here so I am pretty far removed from the education system.  I have done some work for school systems in the past and I refuse all school system work now.  Either they have an IT staff and they do not really need me or they are out to lunch and the politics involved and budgeting involved is more than I care to deal with.  I would imagine though that the people actually are more educated than you think they are but they are just no where near your level.  If they are not enthusiasts or interested in the IT field though thats the way its going to be.  They have to teach to the LCD though,  thats how budgets work.  

 

You would have to lay out the classes more.  I again have been out of school possibly longer than you have been alive.  When I was in school our computer classes consisted of learning to write hello world in BASIC and later in high school was learning to use Lotus 123 and dbase and I think it was an early word perfect but likely was something even more simple for word processing.  It was a 1 semester course and it was considered crazy to even have the class.  I finished the semester coursework in 2 days and went and played in the dark room the rest of the semester (was on the school paper as a photographer).  Anyway thats just to relate how different things were when I was your age,.  You would have to explain what classes you are in and what they do for me to give you a better answer as to why they are that way,.  In the broad term my guess is they are a combination of aimed at the future general office worker rather than someone considering a career in IT.  I remember in HS on the newspaper staff we used macs and used pagemaker which was insane but we had the single best computers in the school us and the yearbook staff and there was no class on the software we just kind of learned it and those of us that took too it did all the page layout for the paper.  

Sorry about that.

 

I don't know what backend they had, but we used individual logins for everything except yearbook/graphic design class and electronic music (which ran Garageband on old macs). We couldn't login before 8 am, so they set that up too.

 

I did not explain this well, but we basically had 4 different interactions with computers. There were the two IT people (locked in their air conditioned room monitoring the school network, etc., the computer class teacher, who was anything but passionate. I think she should have introduced kids to things like open source software, and get them excited about computers. But that's just the enthusiast in me screaming, "How do people not find this interesting?!?!?" :)  We had the computers dedicated to graphic design and electronic music, and last, we had the various PCs scattered around campus.

 

There were 16 people in my entire grade, so I am pretty sure I knew where all my classmates stood. One example--I was trying to explain something (I can't remember what) to a girl in my class because she was having trouble with the concept. She cut me off in the middle of my sentence by saying, "I don't do computers." Even my friends who were somewhat interested in computers didn't know much at all as far as how things worked. I guess I'm just tired of people being amazed by the fact that I know how to take off a side panel. When I suggested to the yearbook teacher that we install a card reader (by taking off the side panel and screwing it into one of the computers) so we could actually access the pictures we took of the campus, she almost had an aneurysm.

 

It seems the IT people actually did know what they were doing, but nobody else did. I didn't really make that distinction in my first post.

[SirReallySam]

Well, i think both of you guys saw my worst two. but one time my IT guy from apple told me to try and get a screw driver to take my ipod apart.

bhahahaa XD

[SirReallySam]

My school is pretty decent when it comes to IT actually XD

[Rhotis]

Sorry about that.

 

I don't know what backend they had, but we used individual logins for everything except yearbook/graphic design class and electronic music (which ran Garageband on old macs). We couldn't login before 8 am, so they set that up too.

 

I did not explain this well, but we basically had 4 different interactions with computers. There were the two IT people (locked in their air conditioned room monitoring the school network, etc., the computer class teacher, who was anything but passionate. I think she should have introduced kids to things like open source software, and get them excited about computers. But that's just the enthusiast in me screaming, "How do people not find this interesting?!?!?" :)  We had the computers dedicated to graphic design and electronic music, and last, we had the various PCs scattered around campus.

 

There were 16 people in my entire grade, so I am pretty sure I knew where all my classmates stood. One example--I was trying to explain something (I can't remember what) to a girl in my class because she was having trouble with the concept. She cut me off in the middle of my sentence by saying, "I don't do computers." Even my friends who were somewhat interested in computers didn't know much at all as far as how things worked. I guess I'm just tired of people being amazed by the fact that I know how to take off a side panel. When I suggested to the yearbook teacher that we install a card reader (by taking off the side panel and screwing it into one of the computers) so we could actually access the pictures we took of the campus, she almost had an aneurysm.

 

It seems the IT people actually did know what they were doing, but nobody else did. I didn't really make that distinction in my first post.

 

haha thats good stuff with the yearbook teacher.  

 

Yeah so you guys are setup properly network wise kind of but the teacher just was horrible.  That happens I guess.  That person maybe teaches another class as their main subject and was "drafted" to teach the "computer" class.  Thems the breaks in school I guess.  

 

The chic that said "I dont do computers"..... I hope shes cute because its 2013 and you will not go far in life without having basic computer skills today.  

[Loe]

The "programming" (I use that word loosely) at my school in computing is nothing but copying code out of a book. I don't actually learn anything at all because I am just sitting copying line after line of code. On that note the code is just for weird visual basic programmes.

[Mo5]

I once (2 years ago) did a prank and disabled the SATA ports in BIOS on one of our school computers. It took them 1,5 years to fix it. Plus they swapped a perfectly working DVD drive for a much crappier CD-only drive that doesn't even match the color scheme of the PC - white instead of black. Now every-time we have to watch a DVD we spent 10 minutes 'figuring out' that it doesn't work :P

[Rhotis]

The "programming" (I use that word loosely) at my school in computing is nothing but copying code out of a book. I don't actually learn anything at all because I am just sitting copying line after line of code. On that note the code is just for weird visual basic programmes.

 

When I first learned to code thats basically how I learned on my radioshack computer in 1984.  With the computer you got a giant book with several programs in it..... that you input yourself and if you happened to have a tape drive you could save them.  If you really try to look at the code you can learn more than you might think without any instruction or explanation.  

 

With that said I am not a coder.  I can write some PERL and some BASH and KSH scripts but thats about it.  Nothing bores me more than writing code so I gave up on that a very long time ago.  

[EST_FatBoy]

From 1-5th grade.

In our little village school we had a little computer room that had 9 computers. I remember that everyone before the classes started ran into the computer room to try and use a computer. 2 computers had like Windows98 on them and a really cool tank game. Those computers "broke" and nobody knew what happend. The power wire just came out. Other computers had Windows XP. The corner computer and the one next to the door were the most powerful because they had the less viruses in them. One guy installed CS1.6 on one of the computers and everybody always rushed to play that. We also played RuneScape all the time untill somebody said that that game was for fags. Then we stoped playing like for a month and then everybody continued.

We had 4 teachers and they didnt know much about the computers but the basic stuff. Turning on and turning it off. I remember that one day when the class started and everybody turned their computers off we all went to our classes and they called me back into the computer room because we "didnt turn the computers off". They were just updating.

I learned alot of computer stuff at home after the 2th grade.

In 5th grade we couldnt use the computers anymore because they got stolen or something.

 

From 6th-8th grade.

Going to the new school I knew ALOT more about computers and the kids in my new school told me that they used to have a computer teacher who installed CS1.6 in their computers and they could play everytime they had computer class. He got fired.

When I got there there were like first LCD monitors and some old computers running XP. Everybody in the class pretty much did nothing and played games. Me and 2 other guys always anweard the questions the teacher asked. The teacher just showed us some tricks in MS Word 2003 and nothing special. Then we learned a little with Scratch. Not much happend till the 8th grade.

In 8th grade they set up a server. Teacher got a computer with 2 CPUs and 24Gb of ram. We got 19" BenQ monitors that I think got hooked up to RaspBerry Pi-s and then those to the teachers computer. They look like RaspBerry Pi-s. The computer class ended in 8th grade but we could still use the computers sometimes.

Me and my friend were sent to our towns computer olympics or something like that. The school we went to had like really old computers with XP-s. They had like 1.5GHz 2 core, 512Mb ram and we HAD to use Internet Explorer. Ughh... It was a pain! The computers were soo slow and we had to do many tasks in 2 hours. We had to program a robot and a router. Then some text correcting in MS Word 2003. Had to calculate if its faster to drive a car from Germany to Russia with 10TB of data or send it through internet. Then some things in Excel. I won some place in the middle.

[_wky]

I have one from today actually. One of the access points for connecting devices to the network is broken so the printer in that room is offline. The "IT Technician", instead of fixing the access point (the jack was broken so just replace that port) he went and got a long Ethernet cable and ran it from the printer to the other side of the room and plugged it in there.

 

 

 

[Lamb]

At my school we are using Windows XP professional...

[Blade of Grass]

Sorry about that.

 

I don't know what backend they had, but we used individual logins for everything except yearbook/graphic design class and electronic music (which ran Garageband on old macs). We couldn't login before 8 am, so they set that up too.

 

I did not explain this well, but we basically had 4 different interactions with computers. There were the two IT people (locked in their air conditioned room monitoring the school network, etc., the computer class teacher, who was anything but passionate. I think she should have introduced kids to things like open source software, and get them excited about computers. But that's just the enthusiast in me screaming, "How do people not find this interesting?!?!?" :)  We had the computers dedicated to graphic design and electronic music, and last, we had the various PCs scattered around campus.

 

There were 16 people in my entire grade, so I am pretty sure I knew where all my classmates stood. One example--I was trying to explain something (I can't remember what) to a girl in my class because she was having trouble with the concept. She cut me off in the middle of my sentence by saying, "I don't do computers." Even my friends who were somewhat interested in computers didn't know much at all as far as how things worked. I guess I'm just tired of people being amazed by the fact that I know how to take off a side panel. When I suggested to the yearbook teacher that we install a card reader (by taking off the side panel and screwing it into one of the computers) so we could actually access the pictures we took of the campus, she almost had an aneurysm.

 

It seems the IT people actually did know what they were doing, but nobody else did. I didn't really make that distinction in my first post.

They're probably using an AD and using Group Policies to do everything, more complex than you think. It's not something that you could easily do (think of the cost) on linux.

They probably have something like Netsupport or something similar running at the same time (to be able to live monitor and take over computers if need be).