B. Rick's Oak Harbor High School Pages
Background
For each class I'm teaching you will find links on the left to the class syllabus and a calendar link. The classroom resources with procedures, lab safety, lab report format, news articles, etc are common to all classes.
Access
- I am generally on campus from 7:30AM until after 3:30PM.
- My room number is B118. Visitors are required to check in with the main office.
- My phone is 279-5778. You may leave a message if I'm not around.
- For up-to-date student grades use your Family Access Link
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Computer File Compatibility
Students creating documents at home may find they can not read them at school or vice versa. Documents can be created within several applications and saved in a variety of formats. Files produced by Microsoft applications such as Works, Word or Wordpad are not necessarily compatible. Different versions of an application (Word 2007 vs. Word 2003) may produce incompatible files (.docx vs. .doc). To ease the pain:
- Pay attention to the format when you are saving!
- Save in an older format (.doc rather than .docx)
- Save in a more "universal" format such as .txt
- Microsoft has compatibility packs for their Office suite.
Students tend to get hung-up on the appearance of their documents (setting the font du jour, font size, etc ). This is a waste of time if you don't get the assignment finished. Just get it done in plain text ! If you have time you can go back and make it "pretty".
Computer Equity
Many students use older computers that have difficulty running resource hungry software. The high cost of commercial software is also an issue.
There are a number of high quality applications available that run well on older machines. Many of these applications are released under the GPL license which provides the software for free ! I haven't bought application software since 1997 and run a completely legal machine.
- Libre Office is a complete office package renowned for its ability to read and save Microsoft® format files. Use AbiWord for slower machines.
- GraphCalc - A very powerful math tool
- Text editor such as SciTE .
Or consider the speed and security of a Linux distribution . I run Debian .
Computer Security
Microsoft users should protect themselves by:
- Running in a limited user account
- Using a firewall such as Zonealarm , Comodo or Windows firewall
- Using multiple anti-viral and anti-malware programs such as GriSoft AVG , Ad-aware , Spybot or Microsoft Security Essentials .
- Update the operating system and all applications especially those related to flash and pdf .