I sent an e-mail to head of district Paul Smith on friday. My letter is voicing the concern of horrible tech support at our school, and a request for things to be made better. This is the message I sent:
To whom this may concern,
My name is Tyler Collins. I am a grade 11 student, who is currently attending Rothesay High School
First-off, I am aware that repairing computers in the district is the job of Help-Desk but truth-be-told, the help desk that we have is obviously too small solve all technical issues in the district. I do not wish to imply incompetence as when they do their job, they do it well, but merely a lack of people to get around the place in a short time. This is causing severely slow response times for repairs in schools such as ours and its a very serious problem. For example, 2 computers in our main computer lab, "Room 111" which is facilitated by Eric Copeland, can not run Auto-CAD (AutoCAD Lt 2004) due to a "Fatal Error:...". This is due to a corrupt or missing file in the Auto-CAD installation directory. Mr. Copeland suspects it will be at least June of this year before those computers can be repaired by the help desk. Considering that there are also 3 or 4 other disabled computers in the room due to total OS wipe outs, faulty RAM and other hardware/software issues, I’ve found that there is only 1 or 2 remaining computers that are not occupied and will work properly. If the problems persist and any other computers bite the dust, what are we to do? Room 111 in our school is the only one with installed AutoCAD on it. We would have to either wait until June or share computers, which would be pretty difficult to do seeing how the courses available all take every last bit of free time available, and sharing computers can make for very cramped work schedules for students. It hasn't happened yet but if 1 or 2 more computers in our lab stop working correctly, and have to wait until June, we will have to resort to desperate measures to get our work done.
My idea is that all technology teachers in schools of district 6 be granted complete access to restricted files and folders of the hard drives. By this, I mean the ability to install, update, remove and change windows components and 3rd party software. I’m not asking to grant students the same privileges because I realize that the access would be abused far too much by students. Granting administrator rights to locked files and folders in the hard drives to teachers would allow them to keep all computers up to date, re-install broken or missing components, and perform basic repairs to the computers, from Disk Defragmentation to being allowed to re-install Auto-CAD on the computers which need a software repair. This way, help desk would have a significantly lower amount of small jobs to get around to, taking away a good portion of the wait time for repairs on their hands, meaning they can get to the more severe problems faster and less money having to be spend on sending them out per job as there would be less. It would also allow us to receive new drivers for internal components as they are released instead of waiting long periods of time for them, so that our computers could run to the best of their capabilities.
The down-sides to this new idea, would likely mainly be the following ;
1. Perhaps a tech teacher may not know how to carry out proper repairs safely or even at all, or perhaps just do not want to do that them selves.
A possible solution would be to make help desk support for software problems optional, not mandatory, and to maybe survey the teachers of what they know about digital technology and software before granting administrative rights to the hard drives secured files.
2. Help-Desk will receive less work to do, therefore less money for them.
However, some schools may not be able to carry out certain software repairs, and still call on them for support. Others may need hardware repairs, which there is certainly no shortage of. Help-Desk is also still handling other things such as Smart Board repairs and set-ups, and this is multiple schools so surely they would not have a shortage of things to be paid to do.
I realize that I am only a student, and that I probably cannot do anything to provoke some change (for better or for worse), but I have felt for the past 2 years that support has been very limited, frustrating and delayed, and hoped for some change but have of course, seen none. So out of concern I have decided to send this. I have made this suggestion for the sake of my own and my peer's education, which is slowed, delayed and snagged by many technical difficulties that usually get resolved a few months following a support request being sent, and perhaps change could be made. Perhaps you may like my idea, and perhaps you may use a deviating idea from this, or ignore it all together, but I do sincerely hope that someone will see that we, the students of this district, need a change in how support is brought to us, and that its a struggle to get around all the big issues presented to us due to the limited and very delayed support for our broken down computers in which we rely on.
If you for any reason would like to contact me, I am available at
TyCo00336@student.nbed.nb.ca
Thank you very much for your time.
Sincerely, Tyler Collins of RHS, District 6
No comments:
Post a Comment