So they finally arrive!

Our first week with the new netbooks has been wonderful and wonderfully horrible. Adjusting to the security steps has been a challenge. But I now have most of the fifth grade signed on. It took 45 minutes with each class to teach them how to get the computers out, log on, log off and put the machines away. I hope the next session goes a bit faster. The students are all excited about the machines. I had several ask if they could purchase them and how. The tablet feature was the most popular to ooh and ahh about.

Some of the pitfalls were

• The cart is tricky! The size of the battery pack makes the machines a tight fit. 
• With the cords facing the back of the cart, there is no way to quickly assess whether the cords are plugged in or not. 
• If a machine has a dead battery, you have to take the back of the cart off to be able to get a cord to plug the machine in while a student is working.
• There are occasions when some administrator access would speed things up. We have already encountered a missing plug in for a web search that we were doing so we had to abandon the search.

Some of the solutions we have found:

• Turn one machine upside down in each slot to help them fit better and put them in together. It is still tough and a bit time consuming, but they do fit better.
• Turn all of the machines around. We needed to feed more of the cords through from the back, but we made it work. Now I can visually see if they are all plugged in and a student can quickly push on each plug to be sure that they are completely plugged in. 
• I have taken the back off so many times that I decided to leave it off during the day and put it back on at the end of the day.
• I will be putting in a help ticket frequently, I am afraid. There are things that I could trouble shoot on my own if I were aloud, but as it is, I will need frequent visits from the techs.