Power Up Learning! Pennfield Schools

Last year, we collected the laptops during Winter Break.  We will not be doing that this year. Students have a couple of options for this winter break.  First, they can take them home.  If you choose to do that, please keep the above notice in mind.  You should store the laptop in a safe place when it is not in use and it should only be used by the student who is in the program.  Laptops should not be left in a car or any other cold place for an extended period of time.  Remember to report to the school if your laptop is missing or believed stolen. Parents please help monitor that situation. Second, they can leave it at school.  We will allow students to bring their laptop in it’s case to the upstairs computer lab on the last day before break.  We will store them there and they can be picked up when school resumes.  Please make sure that the case has some kind of label that clearly marks the students name attached to the outside of the case. 

Please understand that there will be no technical support available during the Winter Break.  If your computer breaks or malfunctions, you will need to wait until January 5 to turn it in for repair.

Gateway was bought by a company named MPC. The company has recently had some problems. Because of this we have not been able to get replacement parts from them for the last month. We hope the situation will resolve itself but in the meantime we are not able to get parts if you break your computer.

PLEASE take extra good care of your computer. If a screen breaks or a hard drive crashes, you will be without a computer for an unknown amount of time. We do not have any extra computers to give out, they are all out and used.

Thank you for your help in this situation.

If you missed the parent training and would like to see some of the information we used go to this site. We will try to schedule a couple more trainings in the 2nd quarter of the year.

Your background at school should be the PUL background that was on the machine.  You can change your home home account to a different background.  To get that back:

- right click on the background and choose properties.  Select desktop and browse to your Q drive.  The desktop background is in the freshmen folder you have there.  Choose that background.

We have found that the home home account is a superuser account and not an administrator account.  This is causing some problems with installing software like printers.  It is also not allowing students to save to the Q drive except in folders (which is actually a good idea)  Here is how to change that account to administrator access.

 1.  Log onto the computer with your school user name and password.

2.  Go to start, control panel.

3.  Double click on user accounts and click on the Home user.

4. Choose “Change the account type”

5.  Click the Computer Administrator button and then click the Change account type button in the lower right part of the box.

6.  Exit out of the control panel and hit start, then right click on My Documents.  A menu should appear.  Choose the last choice, Properties. 

7.  In the target box, erase H:\ and type in Q:\ and hit ok.

That’s it.

You need to change the home home account to an administrator instead of a super user account.  See the above post to do this.  Once you change the account, you will be able to save to the Q. 

It is a good idea to organize your Q drive using folders.  It will be much easier to find files that way.  

So, go to start, my computer, Q drive. Right click anywhere in the white area and hit new folder. Name the folder what you want. It may be smart to create a science folder, math folder, social studies folder, english folder and any other class you have.

When you save, go to Q anc then open the folder you want to save it in. This will allow you to save.

Here are the steps to take to make iTunes work on your home home account.

DO THIS AT HOME NOT AT SCHOOL (it won’t work right otherwise)

1. Login with your school user name and password (make sure the workstation only box is checked)

2. Go to start, control panel, add/remove programs. Click on iTunes and click remove.

3. Go to www.itunes.com and download the iTunes software (if you don’t have internet access at home, you can go to the shared drive at school and copy the file into your Q drive) Save the file to your Q drive.

4. Go to the Q drive and double click on the itunes program and install it.

5. Log off off the computer and re-log in as home, home.

6. Go to Start, right click on My Documents. Go to properties. Erase H:\ as the target drive and type in Q:\ Hit ok.

7. Go to my computer, open the Q drive. Right click anywhere in the white area and hit new, folder. Name the folder My Music. Close the window.

8. Double click on the iTunes icon on the desktop and it will finish installing. It should now work.

9. To go to the iTunes store, you must have the internet proxy off on Internet Explorer. Open Internet Explorer. Hit tools, internet options, connections, lan settings and uncheck the proxy box. Hit ok. It should let you go to the store now.

10. Remember. When you get back to school, the proxy must be on in Internet Explorer. Follow the procedure above and turn the proxy back on at school.

This is a lot of steps but it works. iTunes is more of a “fun” application so it is up to you to get it working…

Freshmen laptops will be give out during World History class on Wednesday, September 10 and Thursday, September 11.  Please make sure you have turned in the parent signature letter, turned in your fee and have an appropriate laptop bag so that you will not have any delays in receiving the laptop.

Sophomores who are new to the district will be given their laptops during seminar on Wednesday, September 10.

Parent training for the PUL program is Monday, September 8 from 6 - 8 pm.  It will run again on Monday, September 15.  There will be a daytime program offered in the future. It is in the computer lab next to the media center in the High School (yellow hallway).

There is a program on the laptops that has expired and will have a message pop up that says the proxy add in has expired. (or something like that)

To solve this:

- Student logs in

- Open Internet Explorer

- Click on the tools button (on the right side just above the browser area)

- Click “manage add-ons”

- Choose “enable or disable add-ons”

- A list will come up.  Scroll to swodum proxy tool and click on it

- in the box at the bottom that says settings,  hit disable

There may be two swodums proxy tools to disable.