This week was a very slow week at the Help Desk. On Monday, I worked with Scott. They had decided that it would be easier to keep the student's papers that had to do with the computer in a file in the computer instead of having them on paper. Scott and I then went through all of the forms filled out by the students and took off the staples to get them ready to put through the scanner. We went to the library where we could use the scanner, and figured out how to use it. The scanner could scan a few pages at a time, and it would send the scanned file to an e-mail. Scott then decided to put the Help Desk's e-mail, scanned a few pages, and then checked to see if it went though to the e-mail. After playing around with it for a little bit, and then making sure it worked, he left me with all of the forms to scan. i scanned all of the forms and then headed back to the Help Desk. Scott said that he would make sure that all of the forms had been scanned and that there weren't any forms that were missed. Then it was time for me to leave.
On Wednesday, Ryan and I headed over to Student Affairs because Michelle, the secretary, was having a problem with her computer. She was unable to use Firefox because every time she opened it, a message would appear telling her that there was a virus and therefore it would not let her use the program. Ryan looked at the message and we noticed that it also mentioned the location of the virus, however every time that Norton tried to delete it, it would not allow it to delete for some reason. He then decided to go to the folder where the virus was contained, and we saw that it was a profile, so he closed Firefox and then deleted the profile. He then tried using Firefox again, and this time it worked. We then headed back to the Help Desk where I then cleaned up some of the monitors that are part of the computers that are for sale, and I also checked that all of those monitors were working. Then I put them away in a box. Faith then gave me all of the student's forms that I had scanned earlier in the week, and i went to the cannon office where I put them though the paper shredder, and by the time I was done with that, it was already time for me to leave.
On Friday, I did not have to go to the Help Desk because we got a snow day. Therefore all classes were canceled, and none of the offices were open.
1 comment:
I am not quite sure what the "papers that had to do with the computer" are but this is a common issue in help desks. People start out by having clients (in this case students) filling out info on paper.
Did they need to have the scanner do OCR on the docuements (Optical character recognition to convert the handwritten inout into digital text) or did they just need an electronic image of the documents?
If this info is just collected and rarely used then it might be efficient to just scan and store them (sure beats having paper although you should think about putting them in a folder with an expiry date so they don't end up getting kept forever.
If the info is going to be used, then maybe they should consider providing an online entry form so the info gets entered via keyboard by students so no scanning would be necessary.
What kind of online entry could they use? Something on myIU? something via an email link? something on the OTS web page? As a learning activity, think about this and then discuss it with the help desk staff.
With the virus problem with Michelle's machine. I wonder why her anti-virus software didn't catch this? Should you check her machine to see if it is scheduled to do periodic virus scans (or does she do that manually periodically)? Often times with help desk visits, it is a good idea to check pc's while you are there as a preventive maintenance visit (checking that it is set for automatic updates and that virsues and spyware aren't problems, running disk clean up or defrag.
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