Technology Team meeting 3 took place yesterday. After unbridled participation at the first two official meetings, my expectation for attendance has gotten pretty high. However, yesterday we only had 9 team members. About half the students enrolled at Cody are involved in the ROTC program, and they had a mandatory inspection after school—hence the 50% attendance. Many of our regular contributors dipped in to tell us they’d be back next week though.
No matter the smaller group size, we pressed on with the meeting. We forced each student to eat 2 Jimmy John’s sandwiches so none would go to waste (actually, we dropped the leftovers off with a teacher who was hosting some freshman for another afterschool program).
Once the kids were stuffed to their gills, Jason (DE Consultant) began his lesson on setting up a wireless network. He had one student find a hot Ethernet line and explained to them how the internet worked like phone lines and wireless internet for your laptop is like a cordless house phone.
Next, he handed a wireless router to the first volunteer, and had her open the packaging and find the directions. Jason helped her when she had any questions, but as a team, they were able to get through the set up without much guidance from us. After they went through the setup process twice (Jason had to tamper with some permissions after the first attempt), both laptops were successfully connected to the new wireless network!
We had planned to show them the pitfalls of not password protecting your wireless network. Jason was going to steal files off my laptop through thin air, but the school’s firewall put a kibosh on that part of the lesson. Instead, Jason answered some questions about his past as a police officer and talked about his current job as an IT consultant here at DE.
Looking forward to next week already, when James (DE Programmer) has each student write their own simple computer program, turning their keyboard into a musical instrument. (I’ll be learning just as much as the kids during this lesson!)
Check out the past entries from my Cody HS journal below.
~Bryan
