One of the greatest inventions ever created has to be the Smartboard. It is by far the best piece of technology that any teacher can have in their classroom. When I found out I would be teaching in a remote village in rural Alaska, I never expected to have one in my classroom. But then I got here and low and behold I have this beautiful board in my classroom. I was one happy lady when I found this out.
Sadly, during the second week of school, I got a message on the screen that said the lamp life was ending. So began the seemingly never ending quest to get Ms. Norman’s Smartboard working again. Since then, I've been asked at least once a day by each student “When will the Smartboard be fixed Ms. Norman?!”; it was torture for us all. I was able to get a replacement for the lamp pretty quick, but then things went downhill. You need to have a remote to reset the lamp timer and I had no remote in sight. So I went about borrowing one from a colleague which didn’t work. Finally, we found the one that belonged to my board but this did not work either. I tried new batteries, switching batteries, googling, and playing around with it all to no avail. I am on a first name basis with two people from the company that we buy parts from (shoutout to Jeff and Jose from The Chariot Group). The moral of the story after working with them was that the remote I need is obsolete, and they recommended me upgrading to a newer Smartboard (yeah okay, because they’re so inexpensive..).
Over the weekend however, the tech guys from our school came to do updates and fix any problems. On a whim I asked if they had any clue how to reset my lamp timer without a remote. Not even ten minutes later both my remote and my Smartboard were back up and running (it was some kind of black magic that I didn't question). This has now indebted me to these men for life. Seriously, my kids have been completely different students since we’ve had the board up and running again. They love being able to do their work on the board and it makes my life ten times easier. The list of people that I need to repay is never ending, but the tech guys are taking the cake on this one (well maybe it will be cookies, but you get the picture).
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