This is a first response to my day today. I'll post this intro now and then add more in a later post.
I spent today with 40 of my Sarasota County Schools tech related collegues in an all day training session. It all started as part of a laptop initiative that our district started this past summer with several schools piloting the program. It gives (loans) each ninth grade student an (HP) PC laptop for the duration of their high school career in Sarasota. Since many schools in our district are predominantly Mac, Tech Support staff have been training real hard on this new platform, as have the 9th grade teachers. In addition, newly built schools are going to have Windows machine from the start and existing schools will gradually transition from Macs to Windows unless a convincing rationale can be given not to.
So today was a day for XP training. The trainer, Suzanne Huff, is from HP. She did a credible job considering that this was a condensed version of a week long course. It covered a lot. The downside was that we weren't given much (any) time for hands on practice. The 2 books that we were given have CDs with the activity files on them, so we can practice on our own. The class was very good. I have been using XP for a few years so there wasn't much in the way of "new" material. There were a few good ideas presented and I came away feeling that it had been worth the time.