ZDNet Education

November 5th, 2009

An unusual day, part 2 (or "My lease is up! Now what?")

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 11:00 pm

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Lease, Teacher, Productivity, Terminal Services, Projectors, Cloud Computing, Workforce Management, Storage Management, Virtualization, Utility Computing

Here’s where my day went from unusual to really informative (check out Part 1 of this story if you haven’t already). For the three years of the lease at the high school (the first time the district had made a serious investment in technology outside of a new school), I’ve been really happy that a pretty considerable line item for technology has been sitting in the books. Of course, if it got cut, then Hewlett Packard would come and take their stuff away, but it’s still been real progress in a school that had limped along with badly outdated technology for too many years. My plan had always been to return the equipment at the end of the lease (the end of this school year) and refresh. I wasn’t sure if I’d use thin clients again, rolling labs, some sort of hybrid model, or do something completely different, but the goal was to maintain that line item and make it stretch as far as possible with another lease.

Then my HP rep came along today as we were discussing virtualization options for the new lease and quoted me a really low price to just buy out the lease and keep everything. Most of it’s in good shape, but the price was so low that it was worth dealing with recycling or repairing some damaged goods. I won’t quote the price since there’s contractual mumbo jumbo involved, but suffice to say that it’s just too low to pass up. Read the rest of this entry »

November 5th, 2009

An unusual day, part 1

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 10:58 pm

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Google Apps, Professional Development, Training, Teacher, Computer, Training And Certification, Workforce Management, Productivity, Human Resources, Christopher Dawson

Thursday did not turn out as planned. I was running late for work and getting ready for an afternoon of professional development with the teachers. No training that I had to specifically run, but as the only superintendent’s office administrator on the district’s teacher-driven professional development committee, lots of coordination efforts end up falling to me on these days. We had several sessions planned for teachers with different interests and one in particular on a couple pieces of RTI software, so last-minute computer lab and database arrangements were filling my time nicely this morning.

It is, however, flu season, so along about 8:30, we got a call from a presenter on a new literacy curriculum we were exploring. Surprise! She had the flu and couldn’t make it. Unfortunately, there wasn’t space in any of the other sessions to accommodate everyone who had signed up for her talk, so we needed a substitute…quickly.

“Ummm…I could probably run a technology training session,” I hesitantly told the PD committee chair.

“That’s a good idea - can you fill 2 hours and keep them interested?”

“Yeah, you bet…the presentation starts in 3 hours, right?”

This is called extreme extemporaneous speaking. Read the rest of this entry »

November 5th, 2009

Edufire raises the bar with new video offerings

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 9:00 am

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Video, Edufire, Video Platform, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Christopher Dawson

When I reviewed Edufire’s business channel launch in September, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the variety of content, both in their business offering and across the platform. As I described it then, Edufire is

a free-market approach to education, teachers in any number of subjects can offer their courses via the interactive Edufire platform (which includes video, chat, and social media components) at a price they set.

While the business channel was specifically directed at entrepreneurs and those in transition between jobs looking to retrain, the Edufire platform was robust enough to meet the needs of many “traditional” students, as well as adult learners. Today, however, Edufire is launching a new Videos section, which should drastically broaden the appeal and utility of Edufire as a source for high-quality learning materials.

Why high-quality? Because the videos, unlike those previously embedded in the courses, allow students to preview teachers before paying for a course. Read the rest of this entry »

November 3rd, 2009

Moodlerooms announces joule platform at EDUCAUSE

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 9:51 pm

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Moodlerooms, Productivity, Open Source, Monitors & Displays, Hardware, Components, Christopher Dawson

In more EDUCAUSE news, Moodlerooms, introduced its joule Learning Management Platform today. While Moodle is well-known open source technology in educational circles, many institutions lack the time or internal expertise to fully leverage its capabilities. Moodlerooms has filled the gap, providing Moodle implementations in a variety of settings. Now, however, many of the features that users either built themselves or found via third parties are integrated into the company’s joule platform.

According to the Moodlerooms site,

With outcomes-based learning, enhanced reports and notifications, federated content management, supported integrations, simplified administration and a customizable streamlined user interface, joule is the perfect fit for any institution or organization.

This is, of course, PR-speak, but the feature set described in the press release is quite interesting:

• Instructors can enhance classroom activities with online quizzes, assignments, resources and forums that are linked to outcomes and standards.
• Organizations can efficiently monitor student activities and provide notifications to promote successful learning behaviors.
• Course designers can streamline course creation by developing useful tags for learning objects that are catalogued in a federated repository.
• Participants can access tutorials and Frequently Asked Questions from within the platform to get immediate end-user support.
• Organizations can select from a wide range of tested open-source and third-party applications to create engaging courses, including an integrated Web conferencing tool from WebEx, Turnitin plagiarism tools, and a portable e-portfolio solution from eFolioWorld
• Educators can transfer their courses and content from an existing LMS for a smooth transition.

The built-in conduit technology allows for close integration of Moodle with a student information system and other student data stores. Similarly, as schools increasingly turn away from grades as the sole measure of student success, the built-in portfolio tools may be particularly useful. With parent access, social media tools, standards integration, and rubrics, parents may finally start to understand standards- and outcomes-based education.

OK, well maybe not. However, joule, at least at first blush, looks to be one of those tools for which educators might actually be willing to pay.

November 3rd, 2009

New Live@Edu offerings keep pressure on Google Apps for Education

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 9:18 pm

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Education, Google Inc., Google Apps, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Corp., Live@Edu, Collaboration, Groupware, Content Management, Enterprise Software

Microsoft made a number of major announcements today, all designed to up the ante in its battle for business and educational customers with Google’s Apps products. The first came when the company revealed major price drops this morning in its Exchange Online and its Business Productivity Online Services which collectively represent Microsoft’s hosted offerings of calendaring, mail, portal, and collaboration tools. Then, this evening at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, Microsoft announced serious expansions of its Live@Edu services, most of which are based on the now-cheaper Exchange and Sharepoint Online offerings.

According to the company’s education blog,

We are also announcing new SharePoint Online-based collaboration and productivity services will be available for students as part of the Live@edu next year. These new SharePoint-based services will offer IT departments more flexibility and control to set up and manage their school’s collaboration and productivity tools in a security-enhanced environment…as well as the ability to access and manage permissions to sites, documents and content (pictures, videos) with enterprise-class control.

These services are expected to be available in time for Summer/Fall 2010 rollouts. Read the rest of this entry »

November 2nd, 2009

Smart.fm - almost enough to make me want an iPhone

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 10:19 pm

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Apple iPhone, Smart Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Christopher Dawson

I really don’t want an iPhone. I’m holding out for a Droid, just as soon as I figure out some way to justify getting rid of my perfectly adequate BlackBerry. However, the iPhone has lots of apps and one in particular is being unveiled today: Smart.fm’s iPhone interface for their online learning environment.

The iPhone app is actually only one piece of the whole Smart.fm pie. Smart.fm is perhaps the most user-friendly, easily customized response-to-intervention (RTI)-like platform I’ve ever seen. The company is rolling out the latest iteration of its website as I write this with over 2 million so-called “learning objects” in its vast library, accessible both on the Web and in the iPhone app featured in the video above.

Before I go any further, though, Smart.fm and the technology they bring to learning deserve an introduction for anyone not familiar with them. I had the opportunity to speak last week with Andrew Smith Lewis, a Co-Founder and Chairman of Carego Japan, Inc, Smart.fm’s parent company and he outlined the new product and the company’s strategy. The following video gives a nice summary of Smart.fm’s approach and web-based software called iKnow. It’s close to 5 minutes long, but provides both features and the research behind what they do, much of which should be familiar to those familiar with RTI software, as well as other research-based, skill-oriented software.

RTI is largely directed at identifying learners with specific deficits or disabilities early on and then providing appropriate instruction to meet varying needs. While the Smart.fm learning platform is useful to all learners, adult and child, learning disabled and gifted, its underlying logic identifies areas of difficulty and presents information in repeated, yet varied ways to address those difficulties and optimize learning.
Read the rest of this entry »

November 2nd, 2009

Google defines its focus in Apps in 2010

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 12:43 pm

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Cloud Computing, Christopher Dawson

No, it’s not Wave. We’ll see Wave evolve and find its way into more schools and businesses who are already using Google Apps, but the real focus for the Apps team in 2010 will be improving their Docs/Spreadsheets/Presentation offerings.

I talked at length with Google’s Jeff Keltner and Gabe Cohen (a project manager for Google Apps) last Friday about where they are headed with Apps in general and Edu Apps in particular. We also discussed what he perceived as their competitive advantage over Microsoft, whose Live@Edu services are increasingly compelling.

Not surprisingly, they feel like they have a pretty good handle on messaging and calendaring. No kidding, right? There aren’t many users who feel like they want to go back to another product when they’ve adopted GMail. In addition, Google has been able to collect considerable amounts of data on the way users interact with Apps, both automatically and via direct feedback. This is certainly driving their efforts to improve the formatting and layout capabilities with the Docs/Spreadsheets applications.

While Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations all work well from a collaborative point of view, so-called document fidelity that Microsoft touts in their Live Web Apps is often lacking, requiring users to manipulate HTML and CSS (or, more likely, just jump into Word or OpenOffice) for serious formatting. By the end of 2010, I think we should expect to see some really drastic improvements in this area, many of which will be based around implementations of HTML 5.

As Jeff pointed out, Google’s focus has not ever been duplicating Word or OpenOffice online, but satisfying user needs. They’ve largely satisfied the needs for a collaborative tool, but now users expect far more exact formatting, even in online offerings. That being said, Google will also be improving their collaborative tools and fully unifying the user interface.

The last area of focus will be particularly welcome for schools looking to implement Apps: granular user policies. This will be part of their efforts to improve the administrative toolkit built into Apps, but means that, for example, we should be able to eliminate chat for students but enable it for teachers in the same domain (right now, this requires multiple domains, and is an area where Microsoft’s integration with Active Directory shines).

I’ll be writing more about our talk this week, but suffice to say that current and prospective users of Apps have a lot to look forward to in 2010.

October 29th, 2009

Remember when FrontPage seemed pretty slick?

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 10:16 pm

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Web, Microsoft FrontPage, Content Management System, Channel Management, Content Management, Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Christopher Dawson

Well, maybe you don’t. But the idea of a WYSIWYG HTML editor was more than a little exciting before the Web completely exploded. Now, of course, the Web has completely exploded. Over and over. Through booms and busts, until it’s at least peripherally involved in much of what we do. Frontpage is no longer the least bit cool. In fact, it doesn’t even exist anymore and has been rolled into other much more interesting Microsoft technologies.

There are plenty of high-end tools for creating rich, dynamic websites. Dreamweaver obviously comes to mind, along with Microsoft Expression Web and a handful of other expensive tools for creating professional content. Plenty of free tools will get the job done, too, especially if you don’t mind coding. I’ve been partial to Aptana for a while now, but the other day it occurred to me that not only was there a better way for many people to create websites, but there were better ways to teach it.

Lots of schools offer web design, web programming, and HTML classes. Technical and trade schools offer much more comprehensive programs of study. A basic understanding of markup languages, at least, is a useful skill for the average student and is easily built upon. However, yesterday as I installed first Drupal and then Joomla! on an Ubuntu web server (Aptana can only take a mediocre web programmer like me so far), I realized that many students would be better served learning about Content Management Systems (CMS).

Not only is the install process itself incredibly instructive (everything from file permissions to MySQL basics could easily be covered as an instructor walked students through the setup on their own virtual servers), but the entire concept of a CMS would resonate well with many students. How many students or adults actually need to code up their own style sheets or write PHP scripts? Obviously some of them do, and we need classes to address this need.

However, most people simply need to learn to communicate and present information in a variety of ways, many of which are enabled by Web technologies. Every blog that gets written, every Facebook wall posting, every Wikipedia entry uses some sort of CMS (at least conceptually). It seems that students could be served very well by understanding some of the inner workings of the systems that make Web 2.0 tick.

Talk back below if you teach some sort of content management system or use a CMS for instructional purposes at your school. Or just share your FrontPage horror stories. It is almost Halloween, after all. Thanks to @MikeBuckley for reminding me about FrontPage - I haven’t walked down that memory lane for a while.

October 29th, 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 = easiest, cheapest upgrade ever

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 10:42 am

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Ubuntu, Upgrade, Netbook, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Microsoft Windows 7, Web Servers, Microsoft Windows, Hardware, Internet, Operating Systems

My budget manager has already told me to be really conservative as I begin the FY11 budgeting process. I have a few sacred cows and some key line items that I know will be funded, but those Windows 7 upgrades I was looking at? Ummm, yeah…I’m not looking at them anymore.

What I am looking at is a web server and a netbook, happily running their upgrades to Ubuntu 9.10. The web server (I just built it yesterday, actually, to run the Joomla! CMS to which I’m porting our distinctly unfriendly district website) was running 9.04. The netbook was running a beta of 9.10. Both cheerfully told me this morning that an upgrade to Version 9.10 was available.

“Would you like to upgrade?” they asked.

“Sure,” I said, as I clicked the upgrade button.

That was it.

[See also: Yes, Ubuntu can absolutely be the default Windows alternative]

Even though the main download mirrors have been hammered today, the server informed me that with my connection, I should expect the download and install to take a few hours (the upgrades happen from software repositories, not the mirrors that contain the install image). About two hours for the netbook. Great. I need one of those Staples “That Was Easy” buttons. [

Having run the upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 beta, I’m not too worried about any snags. We’ll see how my freshly configured Joomla! install holds up after the upgrade, but since I was already using the most up-to-date versions of MySQL, Apache, and PHP, there shouldn’t be any issues there, either. I’ll update this post when the installs finish, but that isn’t really even the point here.

The point is that I don’t need to budget for this upgrade. I don’t need to obtain volume licenses and decide where to deploy them. I don’t need to do anything except click the Easy, errr, Upgrade button. Even if we had to pay for it and properly license it, wouldn’t it be slick if we could open Windows Update in XP or Vista, choose an optional OS upgrade, enter our volume license key, and then walk away?

Of course, it would be even slicker if it was free.

Windows 7 is great and a lot of people would argue that it’s worth paying for. Since I work in a system that has a significant investment in Microsoft technologies, both on the back end and the client side, I’d actually be one of them. However, as I look for ways to trim my budget next year, I sure wish cutting costs was as easy as the most recent Ubuntu upgrade.

October 27th, 2009

Scary Tech: Attack of the Killer Kindles

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 10:16 pm

Categories: Education Technology

Tags: Tech, Candy, Attack, Security, Christopher Dawson

I don’t know what’s scarier: my recent obsession with e-readers or the crazy Kindle nonsense flying about. What I do know is that when my editor asked me to name this year’s scary tech, the first thing that popped into my head was “Attack of the Killer Kindles!”

It eats your homework! It robs you of the rights you’d have if you just bought a dead tree book! It makes Oprah and tech journalists fawn on principle! It’s growing! And even digital natives hate it!

It almost has all the trappings of campy horror. Who needs Evil Dead when Evil Amazon and the Revenge of the Kindle EULA can be had for the low, low price of $259?

Have a happy Halloween this weekend, folks. And beware…someone just might try and sneak a first-generation Kindle into your kid’s candy bucket. I’ll try to go easy on the candy myself, so I don’t launch into another sugar-fueled e-reader blog post.