Wednesday I passed out a seven year old Key Lime Green Apple iBook computer to each of my 26 fourth graders (27 actually, but more on that at a later time). The new batteries finally came in last Thursday – and Saturday my 2 daughters helped me install them and get the computers plugged-in and placed in the carts to charge. I’m still short 3 power cords – but we think we have found a way to fix some of the old ones, so soon I hope they can all charge at once.
I demo-ed how to unplug them and carry them to their seats and turn them on –
right away 2 computers refused to start-up correctly (I finally got Panther to install on one of them today – the other just refuses to start-up from the install disk). We solved a few minor connection and date/time issues and got on the internet briefly – and time was up (we are doing parent conferences this week so our days are short). We learned how to put them away, and that was day one.
Today we reviewed yesterday’s lesson and went to Squaw Valley ski area’s web site. We are going there on a field trip in 2 weeks to ride the cable car to the top, and I knew they had live web cams from various venues. We will be studying landforms, so we are taking digital photos and video of mountain peaks, valleys, moraines, etc. for a project we are working on. More later.
Learning is messy!
I think that particular iBook has firewire, so you can use a 6-pin to 6-pin firewire cable and Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/) to duplicate one of the iBooks onto the one with the bum CD drive.
1. Start up the bum CD Drive iBook by holding down the T key. It should show the Firewire symbol.
2. Take a machine that is setup, rename the hard drive. This way you don’t get confused which drive is which when you run CCC.
3. Connect the machines with a firewire cable.
4. Run CCC.
CCC will copy the hard drive to the one with the bum cd drive.