Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

Yesterday I talked about an activity in class that should have been easier than it was.  My students captured the screen to a file and used the pictures to create a tutorial.  Normally, capturing the screen is trivial in OS X.  Press Command-Shift-3 and a graphic is saved to the desktop.  But these computers are in a lab where files are not permitted to be saved to the desktop.

At first I thought the files would be saved to a different location.  The computer made the familiar “click” sound when I pressed the capture key sequence.  Those files must be somewhere on the computer.  Nope.  No where.  I called tech support services and found out the screen capture feature was disabled and I would have to use Grab (a program that come with OS X) instead.

This little problem was minor.  There was another way to complete the task without installing extra software.  The down side is that none of my students are going to know the quick way to capture the screen in OS X.

The sad thing is that we do this to students all the time.  The Windows side is much worse.  To start with, all the computers are setup with Deep Freeze.  This magical program “refreshes” the computer after every boot.  Someone can install spyware, delete critical files or even format the hard drive and after a reboot the machine returns to its original configuration.  In my opinion, this is one of the greatest educational software titles available.  It makes it possible for almost any problem to be repaired by simply rebooting the computer.

The problem comes when the original configuration isn’t properly setup to handle the flashbacks created by Deep Freeze.  Every time our lab computers start, the virus program says the virus definitions haven’t been updated, there are icons on the desktop that haven’t been used in more than sixty days and none of the patches for the OS have been installed.  Any time Adobe Acrobat is executed, the “do you want to update” message appears.

The students must also be trained to save files on a USB drive instead of the hard drive because all the files saved on the hard drive are lost during a reboot.  Saving to a USB drive is something they should already be doing, so I don’t consider the Deep Freeze features to conflict with normal use at all.

Here is where things start to fall apart.  Many of the keyboard shortcuts have been disabled to prevent modification to the OS.  I cannot use Windows-R or Windows-E.  Files cannot be saved to the desktop, even though they would be deleted after a reboot.  Also a “default” user is automatically logged in when Windows boots and all the “save as” options point to a folder so deep in the directory structure no one ever finds a file saved to the default location.

I could go on, but I think my point is clear.  School computers tend to be so “locked down” that normal procedures are exceedingly difficult.   At the University we have it better than most K-12 schools.  We can get to Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube and blog sites.  I understand why these measures are in place, but something has to give.

My computer lap is dual platform.  The machines are Intel based Apples, but we have boot camp on all the machines along with OS X.  Most days the students decide which operating system to use on an individual basis.  On other days, like today, I require them to complete an activity with a specific OS.

Today everyone made a “Microsoft Word for Dummies” document.  Using Word on OS X, each student created a tutorial (complete with screen captured pictures) that explained how to insert a picture into Word, resize, crop and format it so that text flows around it.  This is a process that each student has done many times, but now he/she had to put that knowledge into a document from which someone else could understand this procedure.

The hardest part of this activity was accomplishing everything using an unfamiliar OS.  Many of them were disappointed that the “right-click” option wasn’t available.  All the processes (File/Open, File/Save, Insert Picture/From File) worked the same as in Windows, but the general layout of the computer desktop was different.  I demonstrated the built-in Grab program in OS X.  There is also a keyboard shortcut (Shift-Command-3) that captures the screen, but that does not work in our labs (I’ll talk about that in another post sometime).

This activity was a good exercise in “learning something fast.”  This is a skill all 21st century learners must possess.  Overall, my classes did well.  More than anything I think they realized that learning a new technology is going to be a regular part of their teaching and a skill they will need to practice.