When asking students at Dulaney if they have ever had any problems with their school device, you would most likely receive an answer of yes. Luckily with the help of Chinese teacher Matthew Lovett and his technology interns, most problems are able to be fixed at school. 

 Lovett has been the tech liaison for the past 4-6 years.  On a normal day he receives multiple help requests therefore, if he didn’t have at least one person come in something would be strange. It has been a lot more because of the recent cyber attack and everyone finally getting in the building after a long online year.    

Lovett this year is overwhelmed by the variety of issues he gets each day. The amount of issues can be a lot depending on the computer and just the day in general. This year specifically with wifi, multiple issues have risen. 

“If the device has been reimaged, once you’re logged in and forget the network, clicking on it and connecting again will solve your issues. Sometimes the mouse doesn’t work. We have tons of different requests,” said Lovett.

After a couple years of running the show, Lovett has noticed that computer issues are repeating themselves. Since this is the beginning of the school year and COVID has been a factor among us, lots of students’ computers aren’t functioning normally. 

“Kids having issues with just using the computer, connecting to OneDrive things like that are the same, students don’t have computers that have been reimaged yet and so there are issues with that. There’s been a lot of connectivity issues to the internet this year as well, more than say than previous years.’’ said Lovett.

        What students don’t know is what happens behind the scenes. Normally, after the school year is finished every student would hand in their device. But, because of COVID, the normal process hasn’t happened in the past two years. 

“Well before COVID all devices were collected from every student , they would be sent to technology support services warehouse and they would have technicians and sometimes tech interns they hire over the summer reimage all the computers. Then they ship them back out to the school and then distribute them to the students again.” said Lovett 

In order to complete all of the requests received, Dulaney has a technology internship program where juniors and seniors become involved to help solve all problems. 

Alex Shaw, a senior and second year technology intern, explained some of the duties he completes as an intern. He fulfilles tasks such as doing inventory on devices, swapping out devices for kids, ticketing and helping with individual issues. Recently the interns have been taking the old desktops in the school and placing them on pallets and getting them shipped out from Dulaney. 

“Students need applications that we can’t put on their computer, so we have to submit a ticket to the county which takes a while to process everything and respond” Shaw said. 

Shaw concludes with his favorite part of the job and said, “it’s one thing to be able to to fix something yourself but another thing to show someone else like what they can do and how they could fix it themselves.” 

Lovett has been working hard with his technology interns to provide help and support throughout the past and the current year through many difficult situations. Their work will not go unnoticed due to the immense assistance given to Dulaney students.