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.

AJ Huff – Coordinator of school community public relations

The Senior Experience
- class

What
- 21st century teaching and learning
- language arts credit
- students apply, 6 students in class
- blog about their senior year.
- Also go to the other buildings
- They get a MacBook
- Digital camera this year
- Taught to be responsible with social media
- Real life experience. Work in the administration offices during class period

Student videos

The project is the 4 Cs.

Why did we need the senior experience?
- additional help
- Social media experience
- Main Street Madison – parent lead public forum. People were visiting it for information instead of going to the school’s website.

The plan:
- First year the students were hand picked for the pilot.
- Wanted it to be part of the main website
- want video and pictures in the blog
- promoting the seniors
- highlight videos

How is it evaluated
- Students are earning language arts credit
- students still have to take senior English
- problem based learning
- website hits
- a lot less misconceptions posted on main street Madison
- track top pages on site, blogs are consistently in the top 10

People do want to hear about the academics

Risks
- safety: signed aup, contract, loan agreement for equipment,
- Money: permanent improvement funds,
- Responsibility: AJ Huff

“Don’t be afraid to take risks, especially smart ones. ” – Steve Jobs

Q: did you have to turn people away the 2nd year?
A: received a list of 40 recommendations from the English dept. Widdowed it down to 20, then discussed with the principal. 12 were asked to apply, of which 10 did.

Q: comments are blocked on the blogs, what about the FB page?
A: FB page is new, but hopefully can turn negative comments to positive.

Q: Any plans to open it to others?
A: not at this time

Q: How did you come up with 6?
A: Original plan was they would be paired, because they work unsupervised in the office.

Q: How will you use Facebook?
A: Ultimate goal is to still drive traffic back to the website.

Q: How often do the students post?
A: In the beginning they tried 1 to 2 times a week, but that became an issue with all the other projects. Now it’s around once every 7-10 days.

Q: How do you handle their personal FB pages?
A: That’s really outside of the jurisdiction of the school.

Q: How much do you change their articles?
A: Quick edits, try not to change the message. Did have a problem with one post, student talked about the whole family going to Florida for spring break.

Q: Controversal issues in the school?
A: Situation hasn’t come up

Yes, I let my WordPress installation rot. And it’s entirely my fault. WordPress makes it so easy to keep it up to date now that there is no excuse, so I do accept full responsibility! I’m lucky in the fact that all the hacker
did was rewrite my .htaccess file to redirect visitors to a malware hosted site.

After examining the WordPress database, it appeared that it hadn’t been changed by the attacker, so I went about installing a new copy of WordPress. It went pretty smooth, and for right now I’m going for a minimum amount of
plugins and keeping the design pretty basic. As I was restoring, I began to think of what the hacker might of had access to and what I needed to do to protect myself.

1. I don’t know if the attacker had access to the filesystem or could only append lines onto the .htaccess file. Why is this important? Your MySQL password for your WordPress installation is listed in the wp-config.php file. If you allow access to your MySQL server from the outside world, an attacker armed with this username and password is free to make changes to your database, even making themselves an administrator. So before doing the installation, I changed my password to MySQL.

2. One plugin I use with WordPress is Automatic WordPress Backup. This makes daily backups of my WordPress installation and stores them on Amazon S3. What I realized after this hack was that if the attacker had gotten access to administrator privileges, he could have wiped out every single backup I have. Worse yet, they could gain access to my access keys for Amazon S3. I went in and changed my Amazon S3 access keys.

What I’m doing differently

1. I will be keeping up on WordPress updates!!!

2. The wp-config.php file, which contains some very important information on your WordPress installation does not need to live in a web accessible directory such as your main WordPress installation. I moved it up a directory. For example, if you installed WordPress in ~/public-html/, you can put wp-config.php in ~/.

3. Once my installation was completed, I created a user for myself and made it an administrator. I then logged in as my new administrator account and deleted the default administrator. This protects against hacks that target the default admin account.

4. I switched to Disqus for comments. The blog only had one user, and I didn’t want to worry about being hacked giving up reader information. By using Disqus, I let them handle it.

5. I installed the CHAP Secure Login plugin for WordPress. This protects logins by encrypting the password. Since I don’t have an SSL certificate, my password would be “in the clear” without this plugin.

6. I will be automating the download of my backups from Amazon S3.

This past week as I was working on a presentation, I had a slide where I asked the participants to discuss among themselves. I wanted to set a time limit, but I didn’t want to have to switch out of Keynote, I wanted it on the slide. It took me a couple of minutes, but I finally came up with a quite clever solution, if I do say so myself.

The first thing I needed was a little countdown video that would count down from 10. I started a new Keynote project, and created a ten second countdown. Originally I used ten slides, with the transition taking a second, so that when played it would count down in ten seconds. The problem came when I wanted to export the movie. The minimum amount of time I could show a slide was two seconds, and since I didn’t want to count down by two a new solution had to be made. So I deleted all the slides in my presentation save one, and put 11 text boxes on it (10-0). I then did a pop build in and out, and set the time for the build to be one second. The out build would happen concurrently with the in build of the next number, so I got a pretty cool effect as a bonus. I exported this out as a Quicktime movie.

Now in my presentation, I added a question text box with a build in transition to occur after a click. Next, I added my movie with a build in transition to appear. The secret is to set the movie to appear however many seconds you want to wait. I set it at 60 seconds, so participants actually had 70 seconds until it finished. It doesn’t appear until the 60 second mark has passed, and then counts down to 0.

Works better than I had hoped! You can download the movie here. (right click and use Save as…)

While there are several full screen text editing apps, I’ve settled on JDarkroom. Written in Java, JDarkroom is a distraction free text editor, taking over your entire screen so you can concentrate on writing and not worry about new email or tweets. It is patterned after Darkroom for Windows and Writeroom for Mac.

I was using Evernote for writing, but it doesn’t have a full screen mode. To emulate the ability to sync my notes written in JDarkroom with my other devices I use Dropbox (Affiliate code in link, dropbox.com is the website without the affiliate code). Now I just save my notes into my Dropbox, and Dropbox takes care of syncing them across my devices. The Dropbox app for Android allows me to edit text files directly in the application, and there are several apps for iOS devices that will let you do the same. For mark up in text files I use John Gruber’s Markdown. It’s a very readable way to encode formatting in a text file. There are several libraries that let you then convert it to html or back to markdown. I installed the WMD plug in for WordPress which allows me to write in Markdown (or just copy and paste from one of my files.

Yes, it’s a little convoluted, and as soon as Evernote as a full screen editor option I’ll probably switch back to it, it does work for me.

Android is an open source operating system created at Google based on Linux. Google allows distributes this OS free of charge to be used by manufacturers and cellular providers on mobile devices. It competes against other mobile operating systems such as Apple’s iOS (used on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch), Microsoft Windows Phone 7, RIM Blackberry OS, and HP’s WebOS.

I purchased a Motorola Droid off of eBay and received it this past week. I’ve been playing around with it for the last couple of days, so this isn’t so much as a review as it is my first impressions.

My smartphone history

A little history about my past and smartphones. I bought my first smartphone, a Motorola Q around 2007 (I think. ). While it was my first taste of online connectivity whereever I was, it was also my first taste of, as the French would say, le pew. It was slow, ate batteries like it was going out of style, ugly, and would just restart for now reason. I moved on to a Samsung Omnia, then an HTC Ozone. The Ozone, at the time (mid 2009) was Verizon’s most unlocked phone. It had wifi and the GPS was useable. All in all, not a bad phone, but still running Windows Mobile. In August I purchased a Palm Pre Plus, which was heaven compared to the Ozone. What holds it back is not the OS (which feels like it could be an Apple product) but the hardware and lack of apps. As an aside, AT&T does not offer service in my area, so I’ve gotten by with an iPod Touch (first gen represent!) I bought in 2008.

This “First Look” will try to focus on the software itself, since in the Android universe the quality and quantity of devices would overshadow any comments about the hardware of the Motorola Droid.

Rundown

Things I like:

• The back button: Until I used WebOS I hadn’t really thought about how useful a back gesture (or button) could be.
• Widgets: It’s nice to be able to put my calendar on a screen, or a battery life indicator with other information about the hardware.
• The number of applications: So far I’ve been able to find an application for everything I need. In the market place there are also tons of clones of iOS games, but for the most part these are inferior to their iOS counterpart. Rope Cut is not Cut the Rope for iOS.

Things I don’t like:

• Notifcation bar: To open notifications you have to click and hold on the top bar and then drag down. Why I can’t just click on the top bar for notifications I don’t know.
• Application switching: Unless I’m missing something, the only way to switch apps is to either exit back to home and click on the item or hold down the home key until the recently used applications show up. And heaven forbid you want to return to an open browser window.
• Navigation in applications: This is not consistant. Some apps, like imo.im (the instant messaging app I use) gives me a different menu depending on what screen I’m on, and to navigate to a certain screen may require several key presses and swipes through several other screen.

Uses in Education

Until models are released that don’t require a cellular plan, educational uses of Android are going to be limited. This year is going to be interesting, but if you are currently researching which OS to use in your classroom it would be hard to recommend Android until other models are released. Android will have two big advantages over iOS (which is going to be its biggest competitor in the upcoming year): price and openness.

Price

Schools rarely look at the total operating costs of equipment and instead focus on purchase price. The Android tablets and handhelds will be cheaper than their iOS cousins, and in some form factors will not have competition (the 7 inch form factor such as the Nook).

Openness

Since Android is Open Source, companies can release software to automatically manage a fleet of devices. If you’ve been involved with iOS app purchases, it requires several hoops to jump through, and then it can’t even automatically install the apps. This can change with Android. Unfortunately, this will probably mean that any price savings you received on the purchase of the devices will be eaten in the management.

Is it a contender?

Yes, Android is a contender in the mobile space. I believe that it is a credible threat to the iPad/iPod Touch dominance we see in schools today. Should you wait? No. If you are looking at implementing a mobile device initiative then don’t wait for Android devices. From an educational point of view there isn’t anything that can be done on one that can’t be done on the other. The Android app store seems to be thriving, and as more devices are sold it will only entice more developers. Mobile devices are set to overtake personal computers any day now .

What device do you use a majority of the time?

My problem was when I wanted to post the current page I’m reading to either account. Ping.fm offers a bookmarklet, but it uses the current logged in ping.fm account, so I would have to continually log in and log out. I decided to put together my own bookmarklet that starts up a new mail message in my default email client addressed to the correct Ping.fm account. To get started, drag the following link to your bookmark bar:

Ping.fm

Once there, right click on the link, select edit and replace YOURPRIVATEPINGADDRESS with your private Ping.fm email address (just the part to the left of the @). Would you like to do it with GMail? Drag this link:

Ping.fm

And once again, right click on the link, select edit, and replace YOURPRIVATEPINGADDRESS with your private Ping.fm email address.

You can drag the links multiple times, editing the email address and the name of the link so you can associate each one with a different Ping.fm account.

I use Apple Remote Desktop or a KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) switcher to administer several OS X servers and machines. When you’re working on machines in this way you can sometimes get confused on which machine you’re currently controlling. If you’re lucky you won’t do anything stupid, but there have been times when I’ve shutdown/restarted a server that I didn’t mean too!

Over Christmas break I wrote a little OS X widget call Show Name. All it does is show the name of the current machine. To start using it you just install the widget onto your Dashboard. Once there, it will show you the hostname of the machine you are currently using on the Dashboard.

Where things get interesting is when you drag it off of the Dashboard and put it on your Desktop. This way you can alway see what machine you’re on. To drag widgets off of the Dashboard, you need to turn on widget developer mode. On the Show Name widget, you can click the little “i” in the bottom right and check the box to turn it on. As soon as you click Done it will restart the Dock, so the Dashboard and the Dock will disappear for a second. To drag the Show Name widget (or any widget for that matter) out of the Dashboard and onto the Desktop, click on the widget and start dragging. Don’t let go of the button and close the Dashboard. The widget you are dragging will stay with your mouse pointer, and you can drop it anywhere on your Desktop. To put the widget back in the Dashboard, start dragging it, open the Dashboard, and stop dragging it. It will now re-attach itself to the Dashboard.

photo credit: fifikins

A couple of months ago I decided to expand my use of Twitter, and began following more and more people in the education community. This was awesome, until I realized I could not keep up with the barrage of data that I was being given. In November I started brainstorming ideas on how to keep up. I noticed in any of my twitter clients that they were not grabbing all the tweets that had been posted from the last time I checked. The reason being is the API only gives you the last 200 tweets, and for me that was about 40 minutes worth.

My first course of action was to write some software that would grab the tweets from my @mr_rcollins timeline, parse the info and store it in a MySQL database. Besides pulling out the data I was interested in of each tweet, I also stored the complete tweet. This became impractical, since in a month the complete tweets themselves occupied 4.2GB! I stopped storing the complete tweets which left me with a 20MB database after a 5 weeks of collecting, which was a lot more manageable.

The next step was to start parsing the tweet’s text for urls, resolve any shortened urls, and dump them into another table for me to peruse. While I got that software working, I came across ReadTwit.com. This is a great service that will take your timeline, parse out the urls, resolve shortened links, and give you a RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader (I use Google Reader. Now I just go through Reader like normal, and am able to tag/star important sites that are posted to my Twitter timeline.

Google has an obsession with speed. In fact, they have found that a .4 second delay in delivering search results causes a 30% drop in click throughs. They started working on Chrome to deliver a browser that is fast and secure. It also offers some other advatages such as isolating each tab or window into separate processes. This means if a tab or window crashes, it only affects that tab or window. Bookmarks can now be synched with your Google account, and extensions are starting to become available.

One of my requirements for a browser is the ability to run multiple profiles. I have one browser set for personal use and one set for professional use (I do try to separate the two, although it is difficult at times). Chrome supports multiple profiles, so now I can launch the default profile which contains my personal settings and I can launch a Mr_rcollins profile which contains my professional settings.

I’ve found that Chromium launches faster than any other browser I’ve tried. After using it for two weeks, it feels so much quicker than Firefox 3.5.5.
Although Firefox has been my default browser for several years, every so often I try out alternative browsers. A couple of weeks ago I started to use Chromium (developer builds of Google’s Chrome browser) for OS X and it has now become my default browser.

Google has an obsession with speed. In fact, they have found that a .4 second delay in delivering search results causes a 30% drop in click throughs. They started working on Chrome to deliver a browser that is fast and secure. It also offers some other advatages such as isolating each tab or window into separate processes. This means if a tab or window crashes, it only affects that tab or window. Bookmarks can now be synched with your Google account, and extensions are starting to become available.

One of my requirements for a browser is the ability to run multiple profiles. I have one browser set for personal use and one set for professional use (I do try to separate the two, although it is difficult at times). Chrome supports multiple profiles, now I can launch the default profile which contains my personal settings and I can launch a Mr_rcollins profile which contains my professional settings. I’ve had Firefox set up for this for over a year and it works pretty well.

I’ve found that Chromium launches faster than any other browser I’ve tried. After using it for two weeks, it feels so much quicker than Firefox 3.5.5. You can learn more about Google Chrome here;. I use the Techcrunch Chromium Updater to grab the latest builds for OS X since Google hasn’t released an official beta yet for OS X.