Organize your email with a Flagged folder
I have multiple email accounts, and read it from various devices. It’s all based on IMAP, so folders, messages read, etc. stay the same from device to device. The problem I was having was when I’d read a message on my iPod Touch or Samsung Omnia (a Windows Mobile cellphone). Sometimes it would be a message that I would need to act on, but can’t right at that moment. A lot of email clients allow you to flag a message so you can remember to go back to it, but that’s not an option on my iPod Touch or the Omnia. At first I’d just mark the messages unread, but that also gets messy (not knowing if I have new messages because of the unread indicator).
What I’ve done now is to create a folder called Flagged for each one of my email accounts. Now when I get a message I need to act upon it later, I’ll move it to this Flagged folder.
Sometimes I will just forward the message to my Remember the Milk account, but that’s a post for another day. 
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Group Twitterbot is broken. :-(
Twitter updated how direct messages are emailed, so my Group Twitterbot code is now broken. I’m hopefully going to be able to work on it this week. I’m planning on fixed this problem and set it up so it’s more stand alone, you’ll be able to use it anywhere you can have a php based web page.
Language arts teachers, take note, experience Bram Stoker’s Dracula in real time
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.
Online collaboration with EtherPad
Etherpad, which was open to users, then closed, appears to now be open again. It is an online collaborative text editor usable by anyone with an Internet connection, a browser, and Javascript. There is no sign up required, you just share a unique URL with the people you want to collaborate with. Each user is color coded and there is a chat box. You can use the random URL assigned or make one up just by appending the name of the document to the end of the url:
http://etherpad.com/NAMEOFDOCUMENT
It has a couple of advantages of using the word processing aspect of Google Docs. For starters, it’s dead simple to get people involved just by sharing the url. It is also realtime, you see the edits of the other people as they make them. There is also a chat box to discuss changes as you make them.
They also offer a private hosted version, but there isn’t any pricing available on the website.
Although some school districts will be wary of using a product that would allow their students to chat throughout the district, I think the advantages would outweigh these concerns.
Uses in the school include after hour editing assistance, a student could send the link to a document they’re working on to their teacher, and both can work on the document. Also, any group projects could use it for notes, planning, todo lists, etc., available to all the members of the group.
The Kindle DX is available for pre-order, does anyone care?
Today’s announcement of the Kindle DX, a 9.7″ version of the Kindle is being hailed as some sort of savior of the newspaper industry and a breakthrough for the college textbook market.
At almost $500 I don’t see it as either. The biggest negative about the Kindle will also be the last thing fixed, if it is ever addressed, and that is the ability to re-sell your content (or at least lend it to others). I’m sure the textbook companies are falling over themselves to support the Kindle. Here is the ability to sell a text book, with no production/delivery costs, and then know that the book will not be resold at the end of the semester.
The newspaper subscription idea has merit, but then again, they need to lower their subscription rates. I’ve looked at transferring my USA Today subscription to digital, but it costs almost the same as getting a paper copy! At least with the paper copy I can lend/give it to someone else, or cut out an article to save.
Is anyone looking at using the Kindle in a school? What would be the advantages of it over something like a netbook?
OS X not saving passwords?
About a month ago I noticed that passwords weren’t being saved in apps in OS X like Safari, Omniweb, etc. I didn’t bother trying to figure out the problem, until today when I would go to a site in Safari and it would ask to save the password. I said yes everytime, but it still didn’t save it. Finally I tracked down this blog post, OS X Keychain Not Saving Passwords…:
I struggled with this one for about a month before I finally dug into what was wrong and how to fix it. It all started when I reinstalled because I couldn’t get BootCamp installed because of volume fragmentation. Since then, my applications, specifically Mail.app and Adium, weren’t remembering passwords even if I checked the little “remember” box.
Basically, for some reason, the keychain file at ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain was now owned by root instead of by me. To check and fix from the commandline ($ is the command prompt):
$ ls -l ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
-rw-r--r-- 1 ryan admin 781380 Apr 8 11:17 (*deleted...*)
My username is ryan. If it says anything else, use the following to change the ownership:
$ sudo chown ryan ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
It will ask for the administrator password, and then change the ownership of the file. I don’t think repair permissions in Disk Utility would fix this problem.
Gmail presents Autopilot
The easiest email could possibly be.
As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.
With Gmail autopilot no longer do you have to worry about actually creating a response. Using technology from Eliza and the CADIE project, Google will craft automated responses in your style. You can adjust for capitalization, typos, brevity and emoticon use.
Attention education vendors
After reading Miguel’s article The Bad PR List at Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org, it got me thinking about the vendors in the education community and some of my pet peeves. My biggest complaint with education vendors is the lack of pricing transparency. If I’m going to take the time to visit your website and examine your product, the least you can do is put some pricing information on your website. For example, if I’m looking at using a student response system with wireless products such as Wifi Palms and iPod Touches, I could visit PollAnywhere.com, click on Pricing, and then K12 and know exactly how much the product will cost me. Now I still need to research other solutions, so let’s visit Turningpoint.com. Cool, right in the middle of the front page they have the product I want to learn about. Let’s see how much this costs…. ummm… Nothing. I can contact sales, but that’s about it.
Vendors, if you don’t list prices, I view that as your solution must be too expensive for my school district. I’m pressed enough for time, I don’t want to jump through hoops to see if your product is something that we can use.
What’s in a domain name?
For Kenton City Schools our original domain name was the standard kenton.k12.oh.us. Unfortunately, only techies could remember it correctly, so I registered kentoncityschools.org. I’m still kicking myself for not registering the .com version, it’s since been picked up by domain squatter. 
Kentoncityschools.org has served us well, even with it being longer than our original k12.oh.us version.
In the back of my head I had always wanted a shorter domain, and with more and more mobile technologies being put into use, it only made sense to try to find a shorter domain name that we could use to supplement our current two. Trying to find a shorter .com/.net/.org was futile, so I started looking at alternative top level domain names, and settled on kcs.me. Now you can go to http://kcs.me/ and it will automatically redirect to our main page. I haven’t started integrating it into to many other services, but I do plan on setting up our email accounts so you can use @kcs.me for any current address and it will work. We also have a custom 404 error page that let’s us setup keywords as shortcuts to commonly used web pages on our website, such as the user’s personal portal page (their MyCatPage, kcs.me/my) and staff home pages (kcs.me/collinsr).
For your school or business, have you thought about additional domains or am I just being weird?
The $99 mobile Internet Device
Nvidia Plans To Power $99 Mobile Internet Devices
Nvidia has announced that it plans to power $99 mobile internet devices with its Tegra 600 series chips, perhaps as early as this summer.
If they can get an Android version released at $99 that is something that could be a game changer in education. Although I’m a big fan of the iPod Touch being an option for a 1-to-1 program, a $99 device with keyboard and more openness would easily make one-to-one programs a reality.
It seems like I’m always waiting…
