The Wonderful World of Technology

EDTEC 566 is coming to an end and in a week and a half a big weight will be lifted off my shoulders. During this class we have gone through software, modeling tools, hypermedia, and many many other things. It has been a crazy and eventful seven weeks, but when it is all said and done there is a lot I will be able to take away from this course. 
 
One thing this course taught me was how many free tools are out there that I can utilize in my classes. The tool that I am most excited about is Jing. I found a good You Tube video that walks you through setting up Jing. I also found a good article ‘Screencasting in 7 minutes with Jing’ , which helps you set up and use Jing.  Another teacher I work with used a program similar to this called hypercam, which costs $40 dollars for a license. He had the students create step-by-step guides for a CAD program called Pro E. Hypercam is no longer on the computers, so I would like to install Jing because it is free. With Jing we can continue to do the step-by-step guides and also use it for other projects.
 
I would like to use Jing for my action plan but the one concern I have is trying to get the software onto the computers. As a teacher I am not allowed to install any programs onto the computers. This morning I suggested to one of the Technology coaches in our building installing this program on just one computer so I could use it, but I quickly got a nope you can’t install anything. The technology coach said he was sorry and felt my pain and wished he could help me, but he was not allowed to install anything for me. How frustrating is that?
 
Teaching can be very frustrating, especially when you are a technology teacher, and you have as much access to the computers as the students. I am constantly standing in my room helpless waiting for a tech person to come fix the problem. Now, it is not their fault there is only two people to fix over 300 teachers computers but something needs to be done.  If as teachers we want to push our classes to the next level we need to have support.
 
So as I finish my rant about no support and start to think about my final project I still don’t know if I will be able to use Jing in my project. Either way life goes on and I will do the best I can with what I have.