To set up, you download the client, install it, and log into your Google account or accounts. It lets you sync multiple Google accounts at the same time, so I can use it with my work Google account, my professional Google account, and my personal Google account. Insync creates a folder in your home directory called Insync, and creates a folder for each one of your accounts inside of it. Google Docs files show up as their Microsoft Office equivilents.

It works really well, just as well as Dropbox. There are a few annoyances, such as the inability to pause syncing (for example, if you’re on slow connection), but for the price it’s hard for Dropbox to beat.

One tip I would recommend is to create a folder inside your Google account folder and use that like you would use a Dropbox account. If your Google Docs account is anything like mine, you have a ton of files and very little organization. Since I’m using this basically as a Dropbox replacement, I created a folder called DesktopSync, and I use that like I would use my Dropbox.

If you are in a Google Apps for Education school district, your Google accounts work fine with Insync. I haven’t tested it on our client computers that students use yet. If it works there, it would be a very nice solution to file access outside of the district.

Lately, I’ve been using it with my iPhone when I’m out and don’t have access to wifi. It works ok, but I was getting tired of constantly moving the iPhone, trying to get it in a good place to use it with the keyboard. I started looking online for solutions, since there were a ton of iPad cases with BT keyboards, I was hoping there would be something for the iPhone. It was then I stumbled across the Wingstand. Consisting of two pieces of plastic, it can be used with or without the BT keyboard to prop up your phone or tablet. It’s not Apple specific. At $14.95 shipped it seems a little pricey for a couple pieces of plastic, but it is made here in the USA and it does work really well. I’m typing this post with my BT keyboard and using the iPhone (unfortunately I have to use the iPhone in the portrait orientation since the WordPress app doesn’t appear to switch to landscape). My original iPad fits with the Apple case on, and so does my HP Touchpad.

If you are going to use an external keyboard with your iPhone or iPad, this might be an inexpensive way to work. Let me know if there are any other solutions I’ve missed in the comments!

Author of “Schools can not do it alone”

Talk about our power. A little bit about the need for change.

Quote by Lincoln

Mold public sentiment

Others have done an excellent job of molding public sentiment against public schools.

Governors think that private sectors know how to fix everything.

Capitalism isn’t unlimited in its ability to create (?)

THE TERM IS CALLED FUD IN TECHNOLOGY CIRCLES.

If school leadership is the problem, then everyone else doesn’t have to change.

NO BLUEBERRY STORY TODAY.

Wall street journal: abolish local school boards.
The farther the decision maker is from the child, the dumber the decision gets. Core principle one.

People used to rally against the soviet central planning. Concentrate all power in the hands of a small group of people.

Terrible trends:
Demographics-percentage of taxpayers with children in school in Ohio is less than 20%. A lot of people have the been there,done that attitude. They have forgotten something. Public education has two reasons for ring developed. Individual benefit for students, the public good. Everybody benefits when they support the public schools. Every aspect of their quality of life is tied toward their local schools. Higher student achievement, lower crime rates. After 7-10 years, tax base rises. Teen pregnancy falls. ER use as primary care facility falls. Vote no leads to the degradation of their community
Media is a “tad” negative. negativity sells because we like it. Schadenfreude.
At the community’s turf, at the communities convenience.
The great clanning of America. School is there to melt us. What if no one ones to be melted anymore? “I don’t want my kids with ‘them’”. Races, socioeconomic, political.
Tinker vs. school board, Vietnam armband protest. Past rights: “I had the right to sit down and shut up.”

Parents are used to getting an advanced customizations. Every student getting an IEP?

Engage your community, positive for schools

It is the best of times. For the first time we have to teach all children to high levels.

Education greats weren’t the a ha moment, writings by the father of public education, Thomas Jefferson. “Rake the genius from the rubbish.” we didn’t need a lot of people to think for a living.

1965-77% of the workforce was low level skills. Making enough money for the American dream. Currently 13%. In 5 years, 5%

We need thinkers, we can’t afford not too.

Schools and their staff have the power to change moral sentiment

Formal track of the great conversation, from the BOE. Go to where the community is for meetings. There are millions that hated schools. They hate going there. Go to them. In teams. Staff should front load the conversation. Americans trust teachers more than BOE of administrators. America trusts the classifies employees even more.

Community understanding. The community doesn’t understand what you do. Jamie’s magic list. Things added in the last century.
Not added a single minute to the school calendar in 7 decades. Download at Jamie Vollmer.com.

The golden age of education never existed. Must break the mental model of what school is.

Community must trust the schools. As understanding grows, so does trust.

Community permission to do it differently. Need to stop grouping students. Y date of manufacture

Community support. Can’t go from A to B without going through C, the community.

5 Ss

- Stop bad mouthing others in publics. Gripe to your spouse, that’s why we have them.
- Shift your negatives to the positives. The more negative you become the more you compromise your immune system.
- Share. Share something positive about what’s going on in your school. Something positive happens every day.
- Sustain the effort, keep this up.
- Start. Start this now. Whoever molds the public sentiment wins the day.

Joined: moral and practical thing to do. We need thinkers. Poorly educated people are desperate, and desperate people are dangerous.

Mississinawa Valley Local school district
- Pilot school for eDays

Replace snow days with eDays?
- ancedotes: take away sled time? Big learning experience

Background/History
- Supt. brought in through a video
- Learning can continue when the instructor can’t be in front of the students
- District covers 80 square miles, miss days after snowfall due to wind
- Superintendent Wendel formalizes plan that is used as a basis for the house bill
- House bill dies, could be due to lobbying from the AFT
- Applied for waiver days from the ODE to try it out.
- Big response from across the nation, spent a lot of time in interviews
- Governor Kasich re-institutes the 5 calamity days and adds 3 online days to the budget bill

School plan
- Teachers are already required to come in two days in the summer. One was used for eDay PD
- The other day was used to complete lessons
- Teachers were paid for two days, but more was put in on their own time.
- Prepare students and parents. Teachers took class time to show the students, parent meetings in the evening in an open computer lab
- Variety of lessons, and a student product (an assignment and assessment)

eLesson Components
- Target
Pick some standards that are hard to hit in the classroom due to other standards
- Instruction
Reading
Podcasts
Vodcasts
- Teacher contact information
–Duplicate the learning that occurs in a normal day

Lesson types
- Rubric was used to grade the lesson: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced
- Everyone was required to have a Basic lesson, but the goal was for the teachers to move to intermediate and/or advanced lesson plans
- Component of an eDay Lesson: Student Tasks, Student Product
- See Darke County ESC for rubric

What happens on an eDay
- Teachers/students notified
- Teaches enable lessons, using First Class
- Teachers will be available for consilt during day either by phone or email
- Students have 2 weeks to complete assignments if needed

What if students don’t have internet?
- Initial survey showed that only 11% did not have Internet, 50% free/reduced lunches
- Discuss with students ahead of time
- Weather permitting:
• Community building open with laptops and tech coordinator
• School building will be open
- 2 week window to complete assignments
• Work on them during non-instructional times of school day
• After school hours

Sample Pages
- First class

WHERE IS MOODLE? GOOGLE DOCS?

- Teacher is usually online to assist during the day
- Only open up the current eDay’s lesson, didn’t want students to complete all the eday work on the first day

WHY NOT? IF THEY CAN COMPLETE IT SUCCESSFULLY, WHY NOT LET THEM COMPLETE IT ALL?

- issues that cropped up: lessons took too much time, computer sharing in households with multiple students
- Teachers learned a lot of what works and what doesn’t work the first year
- Found out some students only had dial-up, video was difficult

NICE USE OF A DIGITAL CAMERA TO “SCAN” IN PAGES TO PUT ON A WEBPAGE

- Lessons are stand alone

I HOPE THEY AREN’T TEACHING SKILLS IN ISOLATION, THEY SHOULD BUILD SOMEWHAT ON THE FIRST HALF OF THE YEAR (MAKE UP DAYS WOULDN’T BE UNTIL ALL CALAMATY DAYS ARE EXHAUSTED, WHICH WOULDN’T BE UNTIL JAN OR FEB).

- Surfing the Internet took a lot a time because there is so much stuff out there. Actually inspired the teacher to integrate other resources that were found.
- Elementary PE: Timed sit-ups, push-ups, and measure reach.

NO SHOVELING SNOW?

- Teacher’s daughter wanted to do some of the activities after the eDay ended

Statistic Comparisons
- 100% of the teachers believed their eLessons were of high instructional value
- 72% of the students said they were able to learn by completing the eLessons
- 80% of the parents thought the lessons were of high instructional value
- 52% of the students said the learning equaled what they learn on a “regular” day, 60% of parents
- 100% of teachers, 57% of students, 67% of parents believed the school should continue the eDay program
- Older siblings liked helping the younger students complete some of their tasks

Lessons Learned
- Too much time between the actual eDay and when they are due. More information and tasks were given than what would have been given in a normal class period
- Students were frustrated in the completion of the lesson and the time it took
- Students are passive learners
- There should be no athletic practices during school time on eDays
- Parents view parental involvment as something that occurs inside the school
- Incorporate this type of technology throughout the year
- Online time cannot equal chair time
- Automated system for product return is necassary
– Need a consistent, agreed upon method for student/teacher communication
- Lack of completion consequences needs to be more fully developed
- More parent/student prep needed
- Need to have a contingency plan before you need the contengency plan

COULD AN EDAY BE USED TO ALLOW TEACHERS PD DAYS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR?

CONTIGENCY PLAN FOR SERVER ISSUES?

Q/A
Q:How do you deal with students special needs?
A: Modified classroom teacher lessons

Q: How did you structure your pilot?
A: 100% of the teachers involved, followed the steps listed above

Q: If two weeks are too long, are you going to change? Do teachers prepare lessons for each subject in self-contained classrooms?
A: Havent approached the two week window. Teachers create lessons for each subject.

Q: Moodle?
A: Looking at it.

Q: Costs?
A: Practically nothing, since First Class was already in place. Already had days in place for PD. Probably 4 or 5 hours for each lesson. Research takes time

Q: Union buy in?
A: Union and administration identified the need and mutually agreed to it. No one wanted to be there mid-June. Waiver days gave them two additional days at Christmas.

Q: No computer?
A: Places open for computer use, and two weeks to have things done.

Q: Outside of snow days, such as no electricity due to winds/ice.
A: Discuss as a district.

Q: Is there a real problem with students working ahead?
A: It depends on the teachers and how the lesson was designed. What’s in their lessons, how it’s set up.

Q: How did you report this to the state department?
A: The survey data was reported to the state, along with the waivers for the eDays.

Comment: Mt. Vernon had a day without electricity, so they just used the two weeks to get the work completed.

Teachers in elementary use Moodle and theme lessons.

This is going to be a pretty high tech article, but the benefits outweigh the work that it requires. I’m going to talk about using cloudflare.com to cache your website and offer IPv6 compatibility. For this to work you have to be using your own domain name and have access to change the namerservers for your domain. If you cannot do this, then you can’t take advantage of cloudflare.com.

Caching

To speed up access to a website, the larger sites around the Internet cache data as close as possible to the end user, usually using some sort of content delivery network (CDN). For the enduser, that speeds up access to the website, since instead of a US user having to transfer data from a UK website, the US user would only need to pull it from a closer server. There are also other tricks that CDNs use to lower bandwidth usage and increase speed. Cloudflare acts like a CDN on your behalf, automatically caching your website around the world.

IPv6

IPv6 is the next version of the Internet addressing protocol, set to replace the current IPv4. If you have an IPv4 address you can’t talk to a user with an IPv6 address and vice versa. Most clients now support both at once, but until all the connections between you and a website upgrade their equipment and software to IPv6, you are still going to be using IPv4 addressing for awhile. This isn’t true in Asia, where they’ve exhausted their IPv4 addresses and there are users there that are only getting an IPv6 address. If you only have an IPv6 address, then you only have access to about 10,000 websites that are set up for IPv6.

Enter Cloudflare

Once configured, Cloudflare manages connections to your website, caching the content. And with a simple switch on their website, you can turn on IPv6 access to your website. ryancollins.org is now on Cloudflare’s network and should be accessible over IPv6.

Should you sign up?

I’m going to run it for awhile and see if any issues crop up. I just noticed the “Threat Alerts” on my dashboard, where Cloudflare already has blocked a couple of botnets from accessing the site. I’ve played around with different caching plugins for WordPress, but Cloudflare seems like a lot better solution, especially since it doesn’t require any work.

I’ve finally gotten some time to put up a rough outline of the presentation I presented at the OSBA Capital Conference in November. Most of the material is there except for the actual audio. I’m working right now at editing in the slides into the audio. It’s slow going but I hope to have it finished soon!

The page is titled OSBA Capital Conference 2009 Presentation.

Experience Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a new way — in real time. Dracula is an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of letters or diary entries,) and this blog will publish each diary entry on the day that it was written by the narrator so that the audience may experience the drama as the characters would have.

What a cool way to introduce classic literature to student’s brought up with blogs and social networking. I’ve subscribed to the feed and can’t wait to read the novel through Google Reader.

If you have any further questions or comments, please let me know!

I would advise, if possible, to use a TV and cable to watch live video of the event. There is a really good chance that most of the live video over the Internet will melt down today with the number of people wanting to watch the inauguration.

Links to major news sites:
http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27721638/
http://inauguration.blogs.foxnews.com/
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/President44/story?id=6655200&page=1
http://www.cbsnews.com/

Parade route:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-14-inauguralparademap_N.htm

Photos and videos and live updates:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/inauguration2009/

http://www.tweettheinauguration.com/
http://explore.twitter.com/inauguration
http://hashtags.org/tag/inaug09