Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • 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.

    ![][]

  • Gmail presents Autopilot

    From the website:

    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… 🙂

    ![][]

  • Google Spreadsheet Forms for class/meeting sign-ups

    I was trying to think of a quick and easy way to have my staff sign up
    for classes. Right before I sat down to whip something up with a little
    php/mysql I realized I could just use a google form.

    [][]To get started, log into Google Docs and under the New
    button, one of the options is Form.

    From there you can create your form. I only needed two pieces of
    information, their name and which class. For the user to enter their
    name I created the first item as a text field in which they would enter
    their name (and Google makes this easy for you since that’s what the
    first item defaults to. I did set it to be a required field though. For
    the class list I used a dropdown field. Each choice I labeled with the
    date of the class, the class title, and the time of the class. I didn’t
    go into great depths like a description of the class since that is
    emailed to the staff and available on the Technology Staff Development
    site in Moodle. Now the staff can easily sign up for classes, I can
    quickly find out how many people are in each class, and I can remove the
    class when the sign up deadline is past or when the class is full. The
    spreadsheet can also be used to take attendance.

    [][][][][][]

    []: https://ryancollins.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/google-docs-opened-by-me.jpg
    []: https://ryancollins.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/edit-form-class-sign-up-google-docs-1.jpg
    []: https://ryancollins.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/class-sign-up.jpg

  • eTech Ohio ’09 Presentation page updated

    [][]I’ve uploaded my slides, my handout, and audio from my
    presentation at the eTech Ohio 2009 Technology Conference to the eTech
    Ohio ‘09 presentation     page. Wes Fryer’s notes from my presentation
    are also online.

    If you have any further questions or comments, please let me know!

    []: https://ryancollins.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/etech-2009-handout.png