🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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… 🙂
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.
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[]: 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
