KISS my browser: The Internet is my phonebook

My head is still sore from all the scratching the last several weeks. I'm just now emerging alive from a series of problems stemming from an event, something I've come to call "the experience" or "the internet is my phonebook". This post is intended to document an event that took down our school computer network, telephone system, access management, and bells. 

At about 10 am in the morning one day the entire network in our school went down. No internet access, no email, just passing traffic through our switches. Not knowing where to begin I figured I would start in the outside world and contact our ISP. I unconsciously pull up my browser to Google the phone number for our ISP only to be reminded that the internet is still down. I knew I was going to be in for a long haul.

Luckily I had a post-it note next to my desk with contact information for our eRate account rep from the ISP and was able to call in to see if we had traffic. I was given the information I needed to configure my laptop to get online directly from our modem and set off to the server room to test the internet. After confirming that there is traffic to our school all of a sudden the UPS in the room starts going off...

I'm already panicking that the entire school has been without network connectivity for 30 minutes. The UPS now distracting me I walk over and press a button on it thinking it would just disable the alarm, instead it cycled the power and took everything plugged into it down. PBX, PA, and bells. When it powered back up the PBX made a scary sound like plugging a toaster that is switched on into the wall. And just like that we have no phones.

Now the experience has gone from a series of unfortunate events to a full blown disaster. Still no clue what was preventing us from getting online, I leave the server room to tell the office that the phones are down, confirm that getting phones back up is now top priority, and get permission to get help from the outside on our PBX. I was promptly approved.

It did not take long for the technician to determine that the power surge had fried one of the power supplies. I now know that when power cycling the PBX I need to turn each switch off before powering it back on and then power each of the power supplies up one at a time. With the phones back up I'm free to start troubleshooting why we aren't getting online. 

The next link in the chain is our firewall. I call in for support. They promptly asked me why our network interface has a /24 at the end of the i.p. Not being a blinky lights and wires guy I have no idea why this is a problem. The support tech went on to explain that a /24 suggests that we are claiming ownership of millions of i.p.s. I'm then directed back to our ISP to get the correct IP settings and then back to the queue with the firewall to go over the changes.

By now you can imagine that the experience will not come to a resolution at this point. Despite fixing several glaring mistakes in the configuration of our firewall we still have no internet. I phoned in a trusted network admin named Brian Norman at Lakes Country Service Cooperative to walk me through the next steps when the KISS mantra starts resonating in my head. Is our domain controller even online? The command prompt confirms that it is not.

Unfortunately turning on the domain controller is not as simple as just flipping a switch on a physical server. No we have vmWare and I need to boot vSphere to check the logs and restart the DC VM. Of course I don't have it installed locally on my machine because well that would just be smart.

With Brians help I plugged a monitor into the esxi host to read the instructions for how to get vSphere. Navigate to the ip address of the host and download vSphere client from there. Well it turns out that the link on this page points to an .exe on a vmware server in the outside world. Can this get any more complicated?

The end is almost here and if you are still reading at this point bear with me because this post has just turned into a schematic for how to troubleshoot problems like this in the future. I reconfigured my laptop to connect directly to our broadband modem, found my way to the vSphere link online, then download and install, reconfigure laptop to get ip settings from DC, log in to vmWare root and spin back up DC...deep breath...INTERNETS!!!!!!!

I left that day at about 9pm. My troubleshooting energies depleted completely. The next day the phones had another hiccup as one of the power supplies still had an issue. We also discovered that one of our bell systems was malfunctioning after the power surge. With no documentation or playbook it took me 3-4 painstakingly frustrating phone calls into the bell system tech support to get things reconfigured with a telephone programming system (don't worry bored reader, I won't go into any of the details). I'm not even going to get into the story of the problems with our access management server or our problems with POE switches running the door locks.

I'm still not sure that I have seen the end of this experience. What I do know is that I have learned a lot in the process. I now have phone numbers handy for all of the major vendors. I have ip settings for testing our internet connection handy. 

It has been challenging to focus on the instructional side of technology in the last few weeks with the all this bouncing around in my head. Hopefully writing this down will clear out some mental space and energy to move forward.

Mildly Inspirational Monday

Over the duration of my first iteration of teaching of the GenYes my students and I have developed a number of structures that have helped us organize our learning in the class. We are still working out the details of how precisely the class is organized, but I'd like to post some of the specifics here.

Daily Structure

Getting their attention and outlining the target-
My students have drafted an agreement that has come to be called, "The Concentration Act" which gives me 3 minutes of their undivided attention: no phones, no inside jokes, no giggling. Just 3 minutes of undivided attention. I set my timer for the 3 minutes and in that time I get their attention tell them what they are going to learn and discuss the activity for the day. If I go over the 3 minutes I lose 30 seconds the next day. If they interrupt me or somehow get distracted I immediately get 30 additional seconds.

Learning activity
During the concentration act time I outline for students a skill or concept that I want them to learn. During the learning activity time they figure out as a team how to accomplish the task. The task should take no more than 15 minutes to accomplish. A task might be how to embed a screencast tutorial into the team website, or how to edit a picture using Pixlr. I tend not to do any "teaching" during this time. Instead I ask questions:

• What have you tried?
• Are there any buttons on the screen that give you clues on how to accomplish the task?
• What does that link say when you hover over it?
• Do any of your teammates have an idea on what to do?
• What other tools or resources can you consult?

Choice time and the teacher assistance project

After all students have completed the task they have a choice of what to do next. If the task was something that got them intrigued they can continue to spend time learning more details or they can pick up their progress on a Teacher Assistance Project. 

#TIL

Near the end of class we take some time to gather as a team to share ten words (theoretically the length of a tweet) on what they learned today. I compile a list of the #TILs for use on Techtorial Tuesday (explained below)

Weekly Structure

The week plays out as follows:

• Mildly Inspirational Monday
• Techtorial Tuesday
• Independent Reading Wedensday
• Throwback Thursday
• Figure It Out Friday

Mildly Inspirational Monday

On mildly inspirational Monday I show TED talks and then we immediately apply something we learned. Last Monday we watched Jane Mcgonigals Massively Multiplayer Thumb wrestling and then played a full class thumb wrestling session.

Techtorial Tuesday

On Techtorial Tuesday I take the most intriguing or helpful #TILs and encourage students to make screencasts on that topic or to make screencast tutorials on things they are working on in their Teacher Assistance Projects.

Independent Reading Wednesday

On independent reading Wednesday we take 20 minutes to read a book of our choice. I'm experimenting with the idea of the task to be having students create book reviews on the books they are reading. I may assign them to read a children's book and then create a book review video or book trailer to share in our Destiny Catalog. So far though we have been reading and working on Teacher Assistance Projects.

Throwback Thursday

Thursdays are reserved for taking some of the old computers in our school and getting them cleaned out and loaded with Linux. 

Figure it Out Friday

We focus our time on Friday looking into our progress on the various teacher assistance projects and how we can get better at supporting the teachers in our school with technology

Reflection

The first several weeks of the course I did not have this structure and to some extent I still don't have it fully implemented the way I have it written down here. Most students have appreciated the structure. Now that I have written down I will have some more points to ponder as the structure is implemented.