I want to thank all of you for your patience. This has been a very busy start to the school year this year and consequently I have not kept up with my weekly posts. Many of you have told me not to worry about it, that you know how busy I am with the extraneous duties I’ve picked up, and I appreciate your understanding.

The reality is, though, that we in education are traditionally overtasked. Back in my consulting days, when my colleagues would complain about their workload, I would tell them that teachers work more in 9 months than they ever would in a year’s worth of consulting. They never questioned me about it. I like to think that was because they knew I’d done both, but it was more likely because they were afraid I would assign them more tasks if they did.

With as busy as I’ve been, I still know that I do not work as hard as a classroom teacher. I do not have to take home papers to grade and although I try to collaborate with teachers on lesson plans, it’s nothing like what I had to do when I was in the classroom all the time.

So, I’m going to do my best to keep up with these posts. The extraneous duties I’ve picked up have to take a back seat to my primary responsibility of helping teachers. Teachers are the stars in education. The rest of us are  just support personnel.

Now for today’s mini-byte….

Many of you are still having trouble logging in to Novell in the mornings. Over the summer, how users are set up in Novell was changed by the Department of Information Technology Services. The “context” was reset for everyone. However, for some reason, your computers aren’t always  ”remembering” your context and it has to be set by hand.

If you aren’t able to log in to Novell, please try the following:

1. On the Novell Login window, click the Advanced button.
2. Click the Contexts button.
3. Navigate to PWCS/HS/Hylton and select Employee.
4. The Server line should be left blank.
5. Once these settings are in place, try logging in, again.

You should be able to log in once the context is set correctly. However, if this continues to be a problem, please submit a Help Request indicating that your computer will not “hold it’s context and has to be re-set”.