Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Ubiquitous opportunity

    How To Use Real-Time Technology In 1:1 Classrooms

    A concern about 1:1 programs I sometimes hear (and that I once held myself) was that students will always be “plugged in” and connected to a device. What seems to be happening on 6 Lime, though, is not ubiquitous use of devices. Instead, it is ubiquitous opportunity. Each teacher on this team has the option to make the best instructional choices each day, each class period. Each student on this team has opportunity for choice in his or her learning activity, growing awareness and taking greater responsibility.

    I love that term, ubiquitous opportunity!

    Via: Twitter – @patrickmlarkin

  • Use your Mac or iOS device like a Chromecast

    ChromeCatch allows you to use your iOS device or Mac as a Chrome receiver, just like a Chromecast device.

    via: Twitter / wfryer

  • The learning style myth

    Why Is the Research on Learning Styles Still Being Dismissed by Some Learning Leaders and Practitioners?

    I have been battling the notion of “designing instruction for learning styles” in my own quixotic fashion for a couple of decades now. In my attempt to be a good steward of my clients’ shareholders’ equity I wished to help them avoid faddish instructional design practices that have been disproven by empirical research. I first learned back in the 1980s at NSPI (now ISPI) conferences that while self-reported learning style preferences do exist, that designing instruction to accommodate them has no basis.

    Wow, research dates back 30 years yet we still hear about accommodating the different learning styles.

  • Technology the great leveller

    Is Technology the Great Educational Leveller?

    People will learn, even teach themselves, if they have access to information and tools. Technology may not be the panacea for worldwide literacy and education, but it is certainly improving access, bringing it to people and places that haven’t had it before.

    Curiosity rules all.

  • Learn HTML with Mozilla Thimble

    Although learning html has fallen out of fashion in recent years, I believe it is a skill that is important to know. Even if you’ll never be a professional web developer, there are times when knowing a little html is beneficial. Today I stumbled across Mozilla Thimble.

    It allows you to write html online in the left pain and immediately see the results in the right pane. Once you have completed your masterpiece you can post the page publicly and share the link for all to bask in your gloriousness. What’s more, your masterpiece is available for others to use as a learning tool and remix.

    Thimble is a part of Mozilla Webmaker a “global community dedicated to teaching digital skills and web literacy.” If you don’t know where to start, they have a ton of various projects that you can load directly into Thimble and use to learn html.

  • Managing laptop users in our oneTOone program with Puppet and Hiera

    As we’re getting ready to roll out 300 laptops, we had to figure out how we were going to manage the individual users on the laptops. The laptops, running Ubuntu, are already going to be managed with Puppet. This allows us to take care of all the settings, applications, etc. on the laptops in a central location. After talking to Gary Larizza on IRC, he recommended using Hiera to manage the users on the individual machines. Today I think I have it licked, and these are my notes so I don’t forget what I did!

    I’m very much a beginner with all this, how I’m doing it works for me but may not be the best way to do it. 🙂 First thing was to create the hiera config file, /etc/puppet/hiera.yaml (apparently you need to restart the puppet master after creating this file):

    ---
:backends:
  - yaml
:yaml:
  :datadir: /etc/puppet/hieradata
:hierarchy:
  - nodeinfo
  - common

    Then I created the test data file. Each computer record will be designated by the computer’s serial number. Hiera will take serial number and find out which student is to be using the laptop. Puppet will then take this information to make sure the user is created. The nodeinfo file right now contains some test data (/etc/puppet/hieradata/nodeinfo.yaml) Password truncated to fit the screen:

    QP6220KLA4Q:
  user: testuser
  password: $6$eKwQ23ju$AdqZ/OXWZqK7xGSVKWz6yjpUti9nvMxRzqKmZ

H09362SF4PD:
  user: testuser2
  password: $6$eKwQ23ju$AdqZ/OXWZqK7xGSVKWz6yjpUti9nvMxRzqKmZ

    Finally the user resource in puppet looks like this:

    $nodeinfo = hiera($::serialnumber)
user { $nodeinfo['user']:
ensure  => present,
shell   => '/bin/bash',
managehome  => true,
password    => $nodeinfo['password'],
}

    Now I just need write a script to write out the nodeinfo.yaml file based on the inventory and the student passwords.

  • Current level of technology integration, what is advanced?

    Tonight on #OETchat the first question was:

    Q1: What do you believe is the current level or state of technology integration in schools & how effective is it? #OETchat

    I answered that most were beginners, and some were intermediate. Then I said that none were advanced. Do you know of any districts or schools in Ohio that are advanced with technology integration? Responding to comments I started to try to picture what advanced means. I guess at the basic level advanced means that students are creating more than consuming. Creating in this sense means more than just using an office suite.

    What are other aspects of advanced? Maker spaces? Coding? Digital publishing and story telling? What else?

  • Could BYOD Become a Job Requirement?

    Could BYOD Become a Job Requirement:

    “Reliable transportation needed.” Anyone else remember want ads with that line? The jobs in question might not have required much of a resume, but they sure did require proof of a solid vehicle to get you to work on time. Was that fair? Maybe not, but it was the price you paid to make a buck.

    With the advances in technology, virtualization, and remote access technologies, it is becoming easier and easier to support a BYOD program. This is a logical step in the business world, one that some school districts have already taken. Do you know of anyplace that this is happening?

  • Learning from the past: use a Mac Plus and Windows 3.0 machine online

    James Friend has ported Hampa Hug’s PCE Emulator to Javascript, which means you can run it in a browser. He has a Mac Plus running System 7.0.1 and an emulated 186 IBM PC compatible running Windows 3.0.

    While those two things are very cool, it’s in his post Why port emulators to the browser? that I find very interesting:

    I feel very strongly about the importance of learning from the past. In other words: not making the same mistakes again-and-again due to a lack of historical perspective. I was particularly inspired by Bret Victor’s talk at the DBX conference, where he demonstrated a bunch of technologies from the 1970s which attempted to solve problems which we’re still wrestling with today, and effectively asked the question ‘Why haven’t we figured this stuff out yet?’, and more implicitly, ‘Why are people who are working on these problems today unaware of this earlier work? Why have we gone backwards?’.

    This is becoming more and more relevant as time goes on, except in the technology world it seems to go even faster! Web forums are terrible, even with amazing people trying to fix it. Usenet News had online discussions solved 30 years ago, yet we’re stuck with so many apps that are terrible.

    Then there are Twitter chats. One of the most annoying uses of Twitter ever devised. There are websites devoted to following hashtags to make the discussion more meaningful, but in the end, you’re trying to force a piece of software to do something that it was never designed to do. IRC had group discussions solved 20 years ago!

    What examples of solved problems do you know that are no longer solved?

    via: Here, Play With Windows 1.01 And Mac OS System 7 | TechCrunch

  • The Internet Archive has added the Historical Software Archive

    Historical Software Collection

    This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive’s software archives. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. (historic software, vintage software, antique software)

    This is pretty awesome, I spent an hour reliving Lemonade Stand. There are IBM DOS apps (such as Wordstar), Atari 8-bit (Elite), and several versions of Pac-Man.