Onionskin

After a couple of snow days at the end of last week, followed by Monday off for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my brain was racing to find a way to allow our students and staff to view the Inauguration of President Obama. We don’t have access to TV broadcasts, and I worried about streaming video on our network.

As I suspected, streaming video was not really an option using our school district’s T-1 lines. Several teachers tried it throughout the morning, and it kept cutting out and/or slipping back into the buffering mode. Our principal and network manager worked together to ask teachers not to attempt to pull up the live streams in their classrooms as we tried desperately to find a reliable stream to project in the gym for all students to see.  We weren’t having much success.

So I pulled out my Blackberry Curve. I just learned on Saturday morning how to use the “tethering” option. This basically means that the Blackberry acts as a modem, and “dials” the Verizon network, accessing the internet from there. In order to activate this, I actually had to disconnect from the school’s wireless network. After that it was just a couple of clicks and my MacBook was connected to the CNN’s live coverage. It wasn’t “perfect” and the video did freeze up every now and then, but only briefly, and we didn’t miss anything. But that wasn’t our fault; I am sure that the freezing had to do with the remarkable number of people accessing that site.

Over 500 people in our school — students and staff — watched coverage for over an hour. They cheered, applauded, giggled, became somber, cheered some more, and put their fists in the air in victorious gestures.

I sighed in relief. This “tethering” option proved itself to be quite handy, on its inauguration.

Postscript: I  didn’t think to take the photo of the set-up until hours later, when the President and First Lady were walking the parade route.