Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • iPads and reluctant writers

    Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: iPadifying the Writing Workshop – Part 1

    “One of my students,” shared the 5th grade teacher whom I was interviewing for a podcast, “has trouble filling up the page. He just can’t do it. It’s too much. But, when writing on the iPad, using the on-screen keyboard, he can. He can type a few words at a time in the small space and pretty soon, he’s written a page. That’s amazing.”

    There is a writing app called iA Writer for the iPad and iPhone/iPod touch that has a focus mode, where it only shows a few lines at a time. I wonder if that would help too?

    Are there applications for other devices that have a focus mode? (Besides iA Writer, which has a Mac version. 🙂

  • Technology and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

    The IT Value Hierarchy: Using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a Metaphor for Gauging the Maturity Level of Information Technology Use within Competitive Organizations(PDF)

    Although information technology products and services may be equally available, the innovative use of IT to create competitive differentiation has clearly been achieved y many organizations. What IT executives often lack is a contextual framework in which to explain the path to increasing value for their firms. The authors believe that this framework can be explained through the use of a needs hierarchy based on a comparison to the human psychological needs hierarchy described by Abraham Maslow more than sixty years ago.

    The parallels to technology in education is uncanny. This paper provides a nice framework for the technology planning process. Just replace IT executives with staff, administration, BOE, and community. 🙂

  • Creating passwords

    From time to time, we all need to create a password. As a consequence of being human, we have a habit of picking really crappy passwords. Here are a couple of ways to generate passwords that should be more secure.

    pwgen

    You can use pwgen in Windows, OS X (install through Homebrew or MacPorts, or Linux. It is also available online, although the online versions may not give you all the features of the program.

    By default, pwgen attempts to create memorizable passwords that are somewhat random. Examples include In9taeme, Xo4eenet, and Riequig2. While not totally random, they are more secure than most methods of creating passwords. Using the program allows you to specify other requirements for the password and a more secure random mode.

    Keychain Assistant (OS X)

    Built into OS X, the Keychain Assistant handles secure password storage for the operating system. It also has a function to generate passwords. You can launch it from the application menu.

    KeepassX (Windows, OS X, Linux)

    I use KeePassX to store my passwords securely. There are other password wallets that you could use that would also generate passwords, such as 1Password and LastPass. I needed something that was cross platform though. It also has a feature to generate passwords.

  • Save and use old Mac fonts with fondu

    I recently received a help desk request to install a font that one of our schools had purchased back in the 90s. Not a problem, I thought. Copying the font to the machine would be easy. I went and mounted the disk image that contained the font, but when I tried to load it into puppet (software that manages our machines), the file was zero bytes. I thought that was odd, so I started looking. The font was a .suit file, which, for those unfamiliar with the Mac world, designates it as a suitcase file which contains a bunch of fonts. Unfortunately, the fonts are stored in the resource fork, not the data fork. What? Forks?

    Brief history of Mac OS file systems

    In the beginning, Mac files could consist of two parts. A data fork and a resource fork. On disk they are in one file, but the operating system uses them in different ways. The data fork stores unstructured data, such as the text in a word processing file. The resource fork stores structured data, like icons and embedded images. You know when you put a Windows formatted USB drive into a Mac and it creates an .AppleDouble folder? That’s there to store any resource forks for files. Although most things stored their data in the data fork (and this is the part that gets copied to media that doesn’t support resource forks), fonts are stored in the resource fork. When copied to a non-Mac formatted medium the resource fork and the font go off into never never land.

    Enter fondu

    Fondu is a commandline application that extracts fonts to TrueType font files which can be used with most systems. I installed it with Homebrew:

    brew install fondu

    Once installed, I navigated to the folder with my .suit file in it and ran fondu on it:

    fondu FONTFILE.suit

    And I was left with TrueType font files that I could easily distribute to the district’s machines.

  • Command line tool for Twitter

    sferik/t · GitHub

    A command-line power tool for Twitter.

    The CLI takes syntactic cues from the Twitter SMS commands, however it offers vastly more commands and capabilities than are available via SMS.

    I have been using TTYtter: an interactive console text-based command-line Twitter client and Perl platform (whew!) but t looks like it could be a pretty powerful tool in scripts.

  • Beware of pretty charts

    Study: Prettier Charts Can Be Harder for Students to Read

    Graphics are often intended to engage children in learning otherwise dry material, such as data on a chart. Yet new research from Ohio State University suggests increasing charts’ artistic appeal can interfere with students’ ability to comprehend the information they represent.

    What do you think?

  • How young is too young to learn to code

    Forget Foreign Languages and Music. Teach Our Kids to Code

    With the help of a custom Java applet, he was able to get kindergartners to write a tic-tac-toe program, based on step-by-step rules the students formulated as a group. And using colored balls and string, he taught the kids how to create graph algorithms, an essential component of computer science. “We believe our work shows that you can start teaching computer science before students even know how to read and write,” Gibson (who now teaches in France) wrote in a 2012 paper.

    I disagree with the title, but not with the content. How young do you start teaching coding?

    Via: Slashdot

  • Progress breeds complexity

    Upon reflection of my post from yesterday, I started thinking that I was being too harsh. The problems with technology becoming too difficult to use stems more from us wanting to do more with them than the year before. Look at the evolution of the iPhone. When it was released, there was no App Store, no cut and paste, no backgrounding. Apple has added those features over the last 6 years, at the expense of ease of use. Now users have to create and manage an Apple ID to use the App Store and learn how cut and paste works.

    Computers 30 years ago didn’t have to network or support multiple users. Printers came with a printer driver for your various applications, not for the OS. Just because Lotus 123 was able to print didn’t mean that WordPerfect was going to be able to print. Applications only ran one at a time. Now your computer operating system supports networking, printing and multiple users. Applications can run at the same time. With this progress brings complexity. Users have to know how to access networked resources and to manage users. They have to know how to navigate multiple applications running at the same time. In the 80s we had Automenu and we liked it.

    We are victims of our own success.

  • Computers are to difficult to use and I’m proud of my digital illiteracy

    Computers are too difficult and people are computer illiterate

    Adults have worn their computer illiteracy as a badge of pride for many years now so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that their children share their digital inadequacies. Moreover, neither group is even willing to try to solve a problem when they encounter it.

    As recent privacy and malware issues have demonstrated, there is a price to be paid for computer illiteracy. And nobody should ever be proud of being ignorant. If not knowing something is a nonissue, then it’s a nonissue, but don’t brag about it.

    I’m seeing this more and more, people expect to be spoon fed and once you get to the third step, they believe it’s too hard to do and shut down. Are you seeing this in your district?

    Via: Daring Fireball Linked List: Computers Are Too Difficult and People Are Computer Illiterate

  • Using Google Sheets for a new hire workflow

    Apparently, there is some interest in a workflow for new hires. At the beginning of the year I worked with our superintendent’s secretary and others in the administration offices to create a workflow for new hires. This way we know exactly what has been and hasn’t been done for new hires. Here is the worksheet.

    Getting started

    Open the document and use File -> Make a copy… to make a copy of the Google Sheet. We use two worksheets, one for classified employees, one for certified. They are pretty much the same. Once you have the copy, you’ll need to share the sheet with those that have tasks to be completed when new employees are hired. Have them double check their steps, adding or subtracting items if necessary. Be careful near the top under the superintendent secretary area, don’t delete the two columns that list the various employees and whether they are finished.

    Once everyone is satisfied with the steps, you’ll need to update the formulas for each person in the Complete column near the top of the screen. The current formula for the superintendent’s secretary looks like this:

    =IF(ARRAYFORMULA(OR(ISBLANK(B4:B17)));"No" ;"Yes")

    The range in the ISBLANK() function represents the items for the superintendent’s secretary to complete. The formula in this cell just checks to see if any of the items are blank, and if so, sets the value of the cell to No. Update the ranges for each person to reflect their tasks listed in column A.

    Once all the items have a value, the formula returns Yes. Conditional formatting is turned on for these cells. If the value is No it sets the background to red. Once it says Yes the background is set to green. The formula only checks whether the item is blank, so feel free to put whatever you want in those cells for the items to be completed.

    The second sheet is a computer info sheet that the superintendent’s secretary can print and give to the new hire. Modify it to suit your district.

    Procedure

    1. When a new employee is hired, the superintendent’s secretary will open up the New Certified Staff Member Worksheet and create a copy.
    2. Name the worksheet with the new hire’s name, for example, New Hire Worksheet, John Smith. Be sure to check Share it with the same people.
    3. Use File -> Email collaborators… to notify everyone that there is a new hire.

    Complete the worksheet.