Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Setup a Facebook Page instead of using your personal FB account

    One common question I see asked all the time is whether or not teachers
    should friend students on Facebook. Although you can set your privacy
    settings on Facebook to hide certain aspects of your life from groups of
    friends, this isn’t fool proof. Friending everyone including students
    and parents simply begins breaking down yet another wall between your
    professional life and personal life.

    What you can do is create a Facebook Page for yourself. This gives you a
    presence on Facebook that can be used professionally which is totally
    separated from your person life.

    “A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your
    business and products with Facebook users. Create one in a few minutes
    with our simple interface.”

    Unfortunately, your created page has a very unwieldy url. Mine is
    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ryan-Collins/181385642299. What I’ve done
    is setup a redirect from my website to point ryancollins.org/facebook to
    my Facebook Page. Be sure to become a friend when you visit! 🙂

    Facebook Pages are not limited to people either, you could also create a
    Page for each class you teacher or other departments within your
    organization.

    More information about creating a Facebook Page:

    How to: Create a Facebook Fan Page

    5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page

    How To Create and Promote Your Facebook Fan Page

    How To: Create a Facebook Fan Page

    facebook-graphicOne common question I see asked all the time is
    whether or not teachers should friend students on Facebook. Although you
    can set your privacy settings on Facebook to hide certain aspects of
    your life from groups of friends, this isn’t fool proof. Friending
    everyone including students and parents simply begins breaking down yet
    another wall between your professional life and personal life.

    What you can do is create a Facebook Page for yourself. This gives you a
    presence on Facebook that can be used professionally which is totally
    separated from your person life.

    “A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your
    business and products with Facebook users. Create one in a few minutes
    with our simple interface.”

    Unfortunately, your created page has a very unwieldy url. Mine is
    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ryan-Collins/181385642299. What I’ve
    done is setup a redirect from my website to point
    https://ryancollins.org/facebook to my Facebook Page. Be sure to
    become a friend when you visit! 🙂

    Facebook Pages are not limited to people either, you could also create a
    Page for each class you teacher or other departments within your
    organization.

    More information about creating a Facebook Page:

    [ad]

  • It feels like the 50s with all this Chrome

    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, 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.

  • OSBA Capital Conference ’09 Presentation Page Now Up

    [cc2009header][]

    I’ve finally gotten some time to put up a rough outline of the
    presentation     I presented at the OSBA Capital Conference in November.
    Most of the material is there except for the actual audio. I’m working
    right now at editing in the slides into the audio. It’s slow going but I
    hope to have it finished soon!

    The page is titled OSBA Capital Conference 2009 Presentation.

    [cc2009header]: http://cc.osba-ohio.org/

  • Next presentation – OSBA Capital Conference, 11/10/09, Columbus, OH

    I will be presenting at the Ohio School Board Association’s Capital
    Conference at the Greater Columbus Convention Center on November 10 at
    3:30pm. My presentation is on using cell phones and other mobile network
    devices in the classroom.

  • 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. 🙂

    ![][]

  • 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

    Dracula

    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?

    ![][1]

  • 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.

    ![][]