MOUSE Squad Aragon goes to the Googleplex

Check out our flickr site for the last Friday’s (April 27th) trip to the Googleplex. There are no words to describe the gracious hospitality we received from our hosts Andy Hyman and Matt Yazzie, googlers who have been around at Google for a while. Desiree, a tech hiring manager gave us a wonderful talk about IT and the newest trends in Service Science for technology users and providers, as we ate the sumptous lunch that they provided us. We were given the grand tour of the main campus that featured a replica of Space Ship One in the lobby, a lifelike skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex eating pink flamingos in the courtyard.

You may see one of the impressions that our students had in his blogsite, as he recounts his having participated in this most awesome of field trips.

Save the Dates! Video Game & Tech Panel, June 1st Summit, others…

April 19, 2007 – (Thursday) Video Game and Technology Panel

You and your students and their parents are invited to the Video Game and Technology Panel that will be held on April 19, 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The panel features speakers Nick Earl, VP and General Manager of Electronic Arts in Redwood Shores, Gerard Jones, author of Killing Monsters and Men of Tomorrow, Peter Moore, VP Interactive Enetertainment and Business and Entertainment Division, Microsoft. The Microsoft XBox bus will be open 3-7 pm to the public and educate the public on parental controls, games and Vista. There will be a free drawing of a Microsoft Xbox 360 after the event. This event is free for students and $15/adults (parents/teachers). Reception and sign-in starts at 6:15 and the panel starts at 7:00-8:30 pm. Please let us know if you are planning on coming.

April 20, 2007 – (Friday) last day to fill out faculty advisor questionnaire on this link below. It is for our NY Mouse Squad office who needs to get the information about your local programs.

 http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=518583145414

June 1, 2007 – (Friday) Annual Spring Summit and Volunteer Recognition/Reception at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View. This will be from 12 noon to 6:00 pm. This will be your opportunity to share your experiences, activities and program with other student tech support students, meet volunteeers, faculty advisors and other MOUSE Squad participants.

Gordon J. Lau’s Tim Fung has MOUSE Squad lessons

I think we should get this idea going, students log on to their school website and access what is going on with their MOUSE Squad online. Tim Fung, who also maintains the school website has incorported MOUSE Squad in their online school site. This is a great idea, students learn how to view everything online. Digitized content is the way to go!!! You may visit his site at http://www.gjles.org. Click on Mouse Squad.

Other news on the Bay Area front:

MOUSE Squad from Aragon High School will present at the (Alliance for Distance Education in Califronia) ADEC conference in Millbrae, CA Three MOUSE Squad students, Kyle Masters Guttierez. Tyler Couch and Norman Eng will help do the presentation on March 16th.

February 24, 2007 @ James Enoch High School in Modesto, CA

Bruce Hill, Bailey Cook and Jarred Cotta spoke at our Student Tech Support and Help Desk presentation in a CTAP6 organized conference at James C. Enoch High School in Modesto, CA last February 24th. Bruce Hill is the Faculty Advisor at Island Middle School in Lemoore, CA, our first site in the San Joaquin Valley area, east of the SF Bay Area. Jarred and Bailey are the captain and lieutenant of Mouse Squad.

Jarred and Bailey were awesome presenters. They got excellent and good evaluations and a sample of some of the feedback responses were:

“Yes, very professional at such a young age.”

“yes, very i loved it.”

MOUSE Squad in the Central Valley is off to a great start!

James Enoch High School is a brand new state of the art technology infused 29M dollar facility that they built on 73 acres of property in the farmlands of Modesto, CA. They installed 48 miles of CAT 6 cable, 31 miles of fiber, 141 IDFs, 1700 network drops in their school. Each classroom is equipped with a $7000 media cart which contained a projector, a laptop, a document camera and a DVD/VCR. Their phone system is connected to their computers via voice over ip.

I could not help but be jealous of their 6 state of the art computer labs, their state of the art forensics and biotech lab, and the most modern band room and drama room I have ever seen.

One of the more noteworthy presentations that I attended was the work of Stan Trevena on Virtual Worlds and Education. It was a mammoth overview of online gaming from the 1974 Maze War by Steve Colley up to the newest Massive Multiplayer Online Games and Virtual Worlds (i.e. World of Warcraft and Second Life). He spoke about their project on the “Pacific Rim Exchange” where Modesto City Schools and students from Kyoto, Japan are playing Second Life before they actually meet up in person. Second Life is an online gaming activity where students set up virtual islands and socialize, exchange pictures, powerpoint presentations, and practice their English and Japanese speaking and writing skills. They use chat and possibly voice communication (next year) to do this.

Stan’s presentation was really an “introducation” to Web 3.0!!!
This excited me a lot because I had met Jarred, Bailey and Bruce only through Skype and the beauty of webcam before this conference. It seemed like I knew them for a few months now and that we were already good friends before this event. Oh well, that is technology for you!

Updates for February 15

This message was emailed to all our Faculty Advisors last Thursday, February 15th.I hope all is well with all of you and that President’s Day was a good holiday. Here are a few updates on our MOUSE Squad Curriculum that we presented at the Feb. 9th training for the 3 new sites.

1. Implementation Guide
Go to http://www.mousesquad.org and sign in as Faculty.
Click on the Certification Tab on the left navigation bar.
Scroll down to Materials
Go to the Faculty and Trainers heading and click on Mouse Implementation
Guide (92 pages) pdf or Word versions. This contains new useful information.
You may want to pay particular attention to
pp. 22-28 ? Technology and Workplace Standards
pp. 59-62 Trouble Ticket templates
p.69 ? Student Certification Tracking for each module.
There is no password for viewing or downloading the Implementation Guide.

2. Quiz Answer Keys for any modules
Go to http://www.mousesquad.org and sign in as Faculty.
Click on the Certification Tab on the left navigation bar.
Scroll down to Materials
Go to For Faculty and Trainers heading
Click on All Quizzes with the Answer Key pdf or Word version
A drop down box will appear asking for Name and Password.
You guys should know the password and user id from previous mailings
Click on Log in

3. Visit our California Blogsite
Please visit http://www.mousesquadca.wordpress.com , our new blogsite. You may
become a contributor or author if you let me know that you are interested in doing
so. Email me at candyband@yahoo.com. It contains updates on our new MOUSE
Squad California activities.

Candy Bandong
STS Site Coordinator

February Training at KCI

22 new and active faculty advisors braved the rain to attend our training to use the MOUSE Squad curriculum at the Krause Center of Innovation (KCI) at Foothill College in Los Altos, CA. on Feb. 9, 2007. What a wonderful opportunity to meet new tech enthusiasts, new opportunities to network with the wonderful people at KCI. Two students from UC Berkeley Haas Business School came to do interviews with Chris Sances, Janette Adams and Susan Fernandez, (Crittenden and Union Middle Schools respectively) long time faculty advisors of our previous Student Tech Corps curriculum. These students are interested in studying the business plan aspect of MOUSE Squad as a non-profit enterprise that serves schools.

As usual, the efferverscent Jan Half was instrumental in making the training efficient and productive. Some salient points were discussed and some suggestions were given by Nathaniel Carter (Sunset Beacon Center at A.P. Giannini) towards improving the utility of the MOUSE Squad curriculum. One was to include “test your knowledge” quizzes after each section of the MOUSE Squad Basics instead of having one big quiz after the entire section. He also wanted more feedback for the teachers to know how well students were scoring in each test section. He wanted to know how he can have a section to view how students as a class were making progress by having their scores tallied in a spreadsheet fashion.

Some of our participants were first time users of technology owing to the fact that we are treading new areas of where we can offer the curriculum, and that is the Annex, afterschool programs of the San Mateo-Foster City School district. There are sites where they have abour 150 students at one time doing after school activities until their parents pick them up.

Teaching them a new set of skills while they are in the Annex can be a productive endeavor that can utilize student power as well as refocus interest in computer skills and troubleshooting. I talked to some enthusiastic teachers but they expressed a lot of hesitation because of the added responsibilities of having to oversee another program over and above their current responsibilities at the Annex. Incidentally, this new program at the Annex will be funded by Proposition 49 funds that direct more monies for afterschool care.

Hello world!

Mouse Squad California is up and running.  NY, watch out for your CA counterparts, we are ready for the world!