Troubleshooting Computer Problems
A Teachers Guide
By Leigh Zeitz
What’s a Coordinator to Do?
It’s impractical to expect every educator in your school to become a
technology expert, but there are a few fundamental things that people can check
before calling upon The Expert. The troubleshooting guide on pages 32 and 33
is designed to help teachers and others help themselves when trying to figure
out why their computers don’t work correctly. The guide was created using
Inspiration 4.1®.
Teachers should use the first panel (Figure
1) to identify the problem and then move to the solution steps (Figures
2–4) that match the number of that problem. For example, if a teacher’s
problem is that the “Printer doesn’t print,” follow the solution
steps for Item 3 to try to correct the problem. The guide is not just important
for saving the coordinator’s timeit also saves teachers the potential embarrassment
of having you fix a “broken” printer by simply turning on the power
switch. (Most of the problems identified in the guide are common among all computers,
but a few are specific to Macintosh computers.)
This may seem like a simplistic approach to troubleshooting, and giving this
guide to teachers will not ensure that they will use it. You need to take time
to demonstrate how to use it and involve your faculty in the process. While
you may not have the time to schedule a whole technology workshop to teach your
faculty and staff how to progress through the guide, you might be able to communicate
some basic principles in a 15-minute segment at a faculty meeting.
I hope you find this troubleshooting guide useful. I have found that it cuts
down the service calls by about 40% and empowers teachers to quickly correct
easily fixed problems.
A special acknowledgment goes out to Aaron Howard for his assistance in preparing
this troubleshooting guide.
Troubleshooting Topics
- Computer doesn’t start
- No image appears on screen
- Printer doesn’t print
- Mouse/keyboard doesn’t work
- Computer asks for disk
- File appears to be lost on the hard drive
- Error: “Application program could not be found”
- Computer does not recognize floppy disk
Leigh Zeitz, Malcolm Price Laboratory School, University of Northern Iowa,
19th and Campus Streets, Cedar Falls, IA 50613, e-mail: zeitz@uni.edu.
Copyright © 1995, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education).
All rights reserved.
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