Attention Ontario Edubloggers – I was hoping to organize another edublogger meet-up at the upcoming ECOO conference. If you are interested in meeting for lunch, sharing stories, and learning from each other in person. We can meet at 11:45 am on Friday, May 5th at the main registration area and have lunch together. I will post a few signs around the conference as well.
If you are interested in meeting drop me an email at qdsouza (AT) gmail.com
What do you do with those old classroom computers when they are becoming outdated and are not working properly? One solution is to keep them online, but throw away your hard drive. You can reuse all those old computers and all you need is a mouse, keyboard, moniter, P2 and up processor, 128 MB of RAM, a network card, a motherboard and possibly a CD ROM. (I'll explain a little later)
I first heard about LiveKiosk at a meeting that I was at where the product was demonstrated. It was being used in staffrooms, libraries and classrooms in a pilot. LiveKiosk was born out of the need to take advantage of the city of New Orleans free wireless access program after the hurricanes. Currently they are deploying up to 100 of their workstations to health clinics and libraries in area where there may be limited access to computers by the general public.
What is really neat is that like many other Linux installations, LiveKiosks EZWebPC runs from the CD Rom. It loads up a customized version of Firefox, to create a web browser only system. You can throw away your hard drive and you can still use the workstation for accessing the internet. EZWebPC runs from the CDRom and can connect to the internet through a local or wide area network. It runs from the RAM on the computer and the CD ROM – so there is zero maintaince. (Your IT people should love that) If you are worried about the CDROM you can get rid of that too. They offer a Disk On Module(DOM) that plugs directly into the IDE on the motherboard.
Disk On Module connects to IDE
Basically it turns your P2 into an internet kiosk based on the MAC Address of your Network Card. It uses the MAC address to lock down the computer to a particular start page that can be created by you and refreshes after 15 minutes of inactivity. You can even lockdown the workstation to a particular web site. (You could create start pages that link into all those web 2.0 apps through internet access.)
All the MAC addresses of the workstations are controlled by a central database where the start page is controlled, the only way to change the database right now is to contact LiveKiosk. They are very flexible and willing to work with schools and school boards. There is also the future potential to run printer drivers, statistics and other goodies from this database.
LiveKiosk offers a 60 day trial version of EZWebPC. Just make sure that the boot order on your bios is set to hit the CD Rom first and you are good to go. You can download the ISO and burn it to a CD to give it a try. http://www.livekiosk.com/kioskimages/
I often run into problems sending large files (over 150 megs) from home through services like yousendit or using online storage services to friends, schools and at the board office. I didn’t want to share a drive off a computer at home because it would be a little risky over the internet. So I wanted a solution and the Slug wseemed to work for me. 
A Slug is the nickname for the Linksys NSLU2 network storage link for USB 1.0/2.0 devices.It allows you to quickly share a thumbdrive or USB 2.0 Hard Drive with devices on your home network or anyone on the internet.You can post a file with a username/password or make it available publicly really easily from your home network.The slug works just like a mini-computer with hard drives and has its own Linux OS.
After about 10 minutes of configuring the slug I was ready to go. I had a 60 gig hard drive that I connected to the slug and used DYNDNS to manage my changing DSL IP address (DHCP) and gave me a permanent url for my slug. I then forwarded the port on my router to the slug and that was it. I have 60 gig network storage device that I could access from anywhere I have an internet connection.
I could have stopped there, but that would have been too easy. I found a cool Linux community http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ that had developed around hacking the slug into different devices – streaming servers, voip pbx, itunes servers – the list is growing.The directions on the wiki were quite easy to follow and I ended up changing the firmware on my Slug, telneting into the device and “unslinging’ the device. I can upload and configure the different packages that are available, including a web server package which looks really good.I can now have the Slug running as a web server publicly. This type of hacking is probably an intermediate level project, but if you are familar with Linux it is a snap.
You don’t have to go as far as hacking the slug and uploading packages, but if you are looking for a network storage device for school/home connections you might want to take a look at the "Slug."
I have been playing with Rollyo for a little while now and love it. This tool allows you to focus your search down to a maximum of 25 web sites and search within the content of those sites for whatever you would like. A great asset when you don't need a Google or there isn't a search engine for the task that you are doing.
Basically, you create "Searchrolls" which can be tagged and then shared with other users. There are a couple of great tools like a desktop widget, firefox search extension, importing bookmarks from your browser, and site search for your web site that you can include your searchrolls in. The site search is powered by Yahoo.
Here is a searchroll I created for free stock photos. http://rollyo.com/qdsouza/free_photo_search/
Just curious what other people have on their bookshelves near their computer.
Here's a photo of my bookshelf above my work area at home. The magazines on the end are 2600 quarterly. I have tagged this photo "bookshelf" on flickr.
There has been quite a bit of media attention around the topic of cyberbullying, much of it geared towards fear mongering. I was hoping to refocus on awareness and education through the Cyberbullying 101 course. The idea behind the course is to give educators, schools, parents and students some useful strategies in dealing with this topic. Banning and blocking web sites may be politically/legally useful to school districts but they are merely pushing the problem deeper. It is my hope that offering ideas, resources, lessons and strategies, through the Cyberbullying 101 course, we can move towards educating students about becoming better internet citizens. The course is made up of topical wikis, resource documents, feeds, discussions and lessons.
The module should take 1-2 hours and will be made available for as long as I can afford the bandwidth. I appreciate any contributions that you make to the course as well as any feedback that you have.
You can register for the course here.
This self-guided collaborative course was built to generate a greater awareness of cyberbullying, as well as provide useful strategies for students, parents, classroom educators and schools.
Estimated Completion Time: 1-2 hours
The enrollment key: cyberbullying101
I had a chance to look at the Scholaris portal solution and I was quite impressed with what it does and its fit in an education community. If you are in a K-12 school board and locked into a Micro$oft environment, you will definitely want to take a look at this option. It is based on Sharepoint and seems to have very configurable webparts that are geared to K-12. There web site is awful, and their brochure is horrible, but there product looks really good. There is lots of potential here and perhaps a rising star for the K-12 portal North American Education market.
Some of the reasons I get for not posting digital versions of documents, PowerPoint presentations and other materials online are – let's just call interesting. I have been told that by giving educators the presentation or the digital version of a document that they would be less likely to show-up for professional development opportunities. Instead, a paper version of the presentation or document is the norm. Another reason I get is that presentations may be tainted by manipulations of digital resources.
I don't agree. I think that access to these resources when you need them held in a central location is a good idea for educators, perhaps a searchable document repository that is topic specific might help. I'm not advocating for the elimination of all paper, but why add to a paper pile of resources that may get lost. If the information is located in a central location that can be located by any educator at anytime they need it then we not make it available.
These types of digital resources also makes for good reusability in order to accomodate for classroom contexts. If you are worried about the authenticity of a document then employ versioning tools that allow you to see the evolution of a document over time or better yet look at wikis and other web 2.0 apps.
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