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Powered by Jolibee [2015-02-07]

There are so many rewards for us in our Reneal IEO work.  Being in the schools, meeting the school heads and IT teachers, working with the teachers during training, and dreaming about the computers being used by the students for learning – these all leave us happy and fulfilled.  However one other very common kindness we experience are the snacks and meals provided to Team Philippines as we work at the schools.  Schools are so generous in their hospitality, and we are truly grateful for the warm welcome.  We encountered the same spirit this week as we installed the Reneal IEO system at Jagobiao National High School in Mandaue City.

Monday morning Raul came to the apartment early to pick up the equipment for Jagobiao: the Cat5 and Cat6 cable, the green bag of tools and supplies, and the small “travelling server”.  As I mentioned last week, Neal was wrestling with a server that wasn’t working following its shipment from California to Cebu.  Thankfully after a complete tear-down and rebuild, it turned on and functioned perfectly!  However he still needed some time to load it with the final version of the software.  Thus we sent our extra server with the team to start the testing at Jagobiao.  Jade and our friends Sharon and Antonio also jumped into Raul’s truck and headed off.

I followed later in the morning, arriving just as Team Philippines was finishing up a lunch from Jolibee (Jolibee is a very popular Philippines fast-food chain – we even have a Jolibee near our home in California!)  I was amazed by the progress.  The IT students at Jagobiao know how to make Ethernet cables, so with Raul they had already completely finished fabricating all of the network cables!  The afternoon saw the team of students replace numerous depleted CMOS batteries and set the BIOS.  Raul did the finishing touches on the cabling to make it look tidy and professional.  By the end of the first day, we had all but one of the computers booting successfully from the travelling server!  These are all Pentium IV machines from the mid-2000’s, and it was exciting to see them performing well with the server.

Neal completed the Jagobiao server work on Tuesday, so Jade and I delivered the server to the school on Wednesday to install it and do the system testing.  It was a bit of a challenge for us transporting in a multicab, since this is a BIG computer (8-core processor with a huge, heavy CPU cooler).  But we got it there, and Jade managed to carry it from the National Road up the street to the school.  The IT teachers there got it put into place, and we did some system loading tests and built the teacher accounts and student name list.  I was also very excited to get a demo of an integrated grades and forms template created by one of the IT teachers.  I have long had an interest in Excel tools to make teachers’ lives easier, and the templates he created are really fantastic!  Jade was also able to get the final computer to boot to the server.  The morning went by way too quickly, and soon we were having another nice Jolibee lunch and saying our goodbyes.

Jade returned Friday for the teacher training.  This was a larger batch of teachers, but it sounded like it went well.  They are interested in running cables to some other locations on campus for additional computers!

Neal has been wrestling this week with a bug in “Khan Academy Lite”, the server-based Khan Academy educational videos.  For some reason, the web server keeps crashing.  He thought he had a solution, but it seems somewhat unstable too.  Since these videos worked fine in the Tanzania release, he is now trying to replace the updated version with the Tanzania version.  Thankfully many of the KA videos are also in the RACHEL educational materials, so the teachers still have a few thousand math and science videos to choose from!  However he is hoping we can get that bug fixed soon at Labogon and Jagobiao.

So even though Neal and I are still limited in our travels, Team Philippines continues to carry on!  Monday we’ll start at Arcelo Memorial NHS in Liloan.  We’ll be installing the desktop computers donated last year by Free Geek along with the monitors donated through Alum Rock United Methodist Church in San Jose.  We are so excited to finally get this equipment in place!