Ryan Collins

🕹ī¸ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Look out, there’s a new tablet in town and it’s HOT!

    Announcing the Kindle Fire

    Amazon announced a few new Kindles today, the most important, in my
    mind, is the Kindle Fire. It is a 7″ tablet running a specialized
    version of Android. The shocker was the price, \$199. With todays
    announcement, every school district that is looking at mobile devices
    will need to take a pause and examine what the Fire has to offer.

    At that price point, it undercuts the iPod Touch by \$30. It also
    sacrifices a camera and microphone. But it makes up for those
    deficiencies by offering a larger and better display. The main problem
    with the Fire would be the lack of applications for the educational
    market. Of course you have access to all the Kindle books, and the
    explicitly list full color children’s books for it, so it may be just a
    matter of time before educational software takes off on it.

    Does size matter?

    In our iOS pilot programs with iPod Touches and iPads it has become
    pretty clear that it is hard to convince teachers that the small screen
    of the iPod Touch can still be used for content creation. The students,
    I’ve noticed, don’t mind using the iPod Touch, so for them, size doesn’t
    matter. When it comes to content such as PDFs and books, the larger
    screen size would be very advantageous.

    Theft is also an issue in school, but the larger size of the Fire may be
    a deterrent. The Fire would also be able to be used by more than one
    student at a time due to it’s size.

    Waiting..

    I’m going to try to hold off any further mobile purchases until the Fire
    is released and I get a chance to use one. I could see it replacing a
    lot of iPod Touches this Christmas, it will be interesting to see what
    Apple has in store on October 4th. If the applications come, the Fire
    will be a very compelling device for school districts.

    What devices are you investigating for use in your classroom or
    district?

  • Formatting for the printed page is dead

    The PrintShop

    In the mid 80’s it seemed like the second most used program for the
    Apple II was Broderbund’s The PrintShop, right after that pirated
    copy of AppleWorks. For the first time, users could create posters,
    cards, etc. all with fancy fonts and clip arts. As word processors and
    page layout tools became more and more commonplace, the final product to
    be shared was an 8 1/2″ x 11″ (or A4 :-)) sized sheet of paper.

    The world is going mobile

    The signs are all around us that the personal computer as we know it is
    dying, to replaced with mobile technologies. Whenever I do PD,
    especially with iOS devices or other portable devices, I tell the
    participants that in 5 years everyone will be using portable devices
    instead of computers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t go over very well. The
    most common concern is how will they word process. After thinking about
    it, I realized what was wrong with this question. In the future you will
    not be creating content that the final product will be the printed page.
    You, or your students, will be creating content that will be consumed on
    other mobile devices. The concept of the printed page is dying.

  • I’ve been hacked and you can learn from my mistakes. 🙂

    Hacked!

    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.

  • Personal computers are extinct, bring on mobile technologies – #OHECC11

    Here’s my presentation from the OHECC 2011 conference and the handout
    is available by clicking here    :

  • Put a countdown timer on a presentation slide

    [][]

    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…)

    []: https://ryancollins.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/countdown.png

  • A Kindle, iPad, and iPod Touch walk into a classroom – #neotech2011

    Here are the slides with notes: Handout from my presentation. For
    those following along with Twitter here are the results of the poll:
    [][]

    I really enjoyed the conference, and want to thank everyone that was
    involved at putting it on. It was very well run (although I didn’t win
    the MacBook Air door prize… :-).

    (more…)

  • A Kindle, iPad, and iPod Touch walk into a classroom – #oetc11

    The slides are available on Google Docs.

  • 21st Century Learning – Return of the Jedi #oetc11

    The slides are available on Google Docs, and I’ve started to put my
    links under http://www.delicious.com/mr.rcollins/partvi.

    Have you succumbed to the dark side? Do you use technology for good or
    evil?

  • Interview with Kent State journalism students at #oetc11

    I was interviewed by Amanda Murrow at the Ohio eTech Technology
    Conference:

    Star Wars for Teaching from David Smeltzer on Vimeo.

  • My presentations for the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference 2011 #oetc11

    I’ll be presenting twice at the conference this year. On Monday, I’ll be
    presenting “21st Century Schools: Part VI, Return of the Jedi” from 3:45
    – 4:30 pm in Room: D230 – 232. This session will be on motivating
    students and teachers, while trying not to stray to the “dark side” of
    technology. The twitter hastag will be #rcpartvi.

    My second presentation is Tuesday, “An iPad, Kindle, and iPod Touch
    walked into a classroom…” at 3:45 – 4:30 pm in room: C213 – 215. This
    session will explore the Kindle, the iPad, and the iPod and how they can
    be used in the classroom. Alternative technologies will also be
    presented and discussed. The Twitter hashtag will be #rcmobile.

    For both presentations I’ll be using Google Docs, and will update this
    site with urls to the presentations. I’m going to try to use the “View
    together” feature, where participants can follow along and actually
    converse if they have Google accounts. For audio, I’ve set up a
    Shoutcast server and I’ll be attempting to broadcast the audio live
    while presenting. I don’t know how well it’s going to work, but it
    should be fun!

    Update: The “21st Century Schools: Part VI, Return of the Jedi”
    presentation is online at http://eduk8.me/nrMMMm. I’ve started to
    collect the links for the presentation at
    http://www.delicious.com/mr.rcollins/partvi