Major Meltdown...4-17-09

This has been a tremendously stressful week. On top of having to miss our STEP work session due to a setback in my mother’s battle with colon cancer, the computer housing the school website virtually melted!!! Ahhhhh!!! Luckily, I have learned from the past mistake of not backing up my documents and such. I do have the most recent copy of the website created with Microsoft FrontPage. The problem is that the program, WS FTP Pro, which allows me to upload the site onto our county server “went down with the ship”. This computer was the only one in the school that had the program on it. This basically means I am unable to make any updates to our site until I find a way to get the program installed on another PC. One option is to convert the entire site using a program that the county is wanting us to switch over to so we are all standardized. It is called Ektron. The training I have had with it did not warm me up to it much more than how I felt about it going in. I suppose I’m acting like a seasoned teacher, resisting change in the curriculum because it is out of her comfort zone. That thing is, Ektron is really not very user-friendly. Also, it doesn’t allow you the creativity that using Microsoft FrontPage does. There is also the time factor. We are nearing the end of the school year and doing a major conversion such as this would be very time-consuming. Luckily, since we are close to the end of the year, our principal was more understanding about our inability to keep parents and the community informed through our site. I am really hoping to find a way to maintain the site as I have been, but am anticipating I will have to give in and conform to the county request in the near future. :(