Technology Committee

Following is a list of technical chores I’ve been doing for Watershed that need to be taken over by staff or volunteers by the end of 2008. (A few of these things - especially the “level 1″ items - are already being handled by other people.)

Level 1: Minimal technical ability (some HTML knowledge may be helpful)

Blogs: Ordinary Use
Updating “Events” on home page
Updating existing blogs
Uploading / updating documents (e.g. student handbook, application forms)

Flickr
Uploading images & arranging into sets
Updating “Gallery” page

Level 2: Moderate technical skills: Management through web-based interfaces

Email Accounts
Setting up & deleting accounts
Setting passwords
Helping faculty get set up with Gmail (or whatever)
Creating/maintaining email forwarders (like “donate”, “pix”)
Dealing with bouncing email problems

DadaMail
Adding parents to Currents mailing list
General list maintenance / tweaking settings
Creating new mailing lists when/if needed

Backups
Regularly backing up Lyceum (blog) database & DadaMail database
Keeping backups of the public web site (HTML & images)

Blog Management
Creating new blogs
Creating/maintaining user accounts for faculty who write or edit blogs

Level 3: Facility with HTML, CSS, & FTP, possibly some PHP and Javascript

PayPal
Setting up Medieval Feast ticket sales
Maintaining “donate” links

Public Web Site
Editing new images (enhancing, cropping, resizing)
Maintaining faculty/staff page
Updating other HTML & CSS as needed

Level 4: Facility with Unix; programming skills occasionally necessary

Software maintenance
Updating blog theme (mainly the links in the left sidebar)
Installing Lyceum software updates & plugins
Installing DadaMail software updates
Other web software?

The printer in the computer lab, Watermark, is currently out of commission (as of Wednesday, Oct. 10th). Endel and I (Matt) plan to work on this issued tomorrow and hope to arrange a working fix. However, based on my conversations with the Samsung representative today, the printer may be beyond recovery.

In the meantime, please have students save their documents to the desktop, email them to their accounts, transfer to jump-drives, or any combination thereof.

Reviewing previous years’ offerings, Endel and I have been able to salvage five working laptops that have wireless internet capability, among varying other capacities.

Three of the Macintosh laptops have been assigned to faculty; Mark, Christina and Paul.
One Macintosh and one Dell laptop remain that may be used for the faculty’s needs. The Mac is able to print and has full Microsoft Office functions. The Dell is connected to the network, but does not have printing, or Microsoft Office abilities.

These machines may be assigned to faculty, or they may remain to be used communally as necessary.