In this post I talked about some of the issues with getting and setting up my new district-provided laptop, the result of one of the stupidest decisions our district made. Seriously, teacher laptops with no number pads? Like we don't ever enter scores into our mandated grading program? No cd/dvd drives, as if many of our textbook adoptions don't have valuable and useful components given to us on CD? Ugh, I'll endeavor not to get myself started on that....
Anyway, I came back to work this week and checked with one of my vice principals about an adapter. You see, neither the laptop nor the docking station the school bought for me (how about that money savings, district?) has an HDMI plug, but the docking station has a different "DisplayPort" plug which, with the appropriate adapter, can be used to connect my laptop to my TV. I got it all connected, but it didn't work. Settings needed to be mucked with.
A couple students offered to stay after school Wednesday to help me out. By the time they were done, I had 3 fully functional monitors--the tiny laptop monitor, the larger monitor I've brought from home, and the TV. Additionally, I could open programs/files on one screen and just drag them to another--so now I can project video or animations up on the TV screen without using wifi (it's all wired now).
Yesterday, though, I noticed that I didn't have audio. That was such a quick fix that one of those two students fixed the configuration in the couple minutes before class started!
There are still a couple bugs to work out and a couple hurdles to overcome (like temporarily hooking up an external CD drive so I can load my statistical analysis software, as just one example), but I'm now probably back to 80-90% of my pre-laptop functionality. Not horrible, and having the 3 different monitors is pretty handy during instruction.
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