Jaycut

I work one day a week as the technology Integration person in a small school with limited resources. The computers only have 256MB RAM. They barely run windows let alone do any video editing. But the teachers have flip cameras they are trying to figure out how to use. One answer I found is the on-line video editor Juycut. It accepts the flipcam files for upload and is a nice, simple video editor. The one thing the teachers need to plan ahead for is the time it takes to upload and download videos.

Moodle

I setup yet another Moodle server. This time from scratch. I bought a domain name and edited the DNS settings. I took an old Dell (1.6CPU 512RAM 40HD) and installed Ubuntu server 9.10 - LAMP server. I installed Moodle from the repository. Easiest setup I've ever had. I tried it with 10.04 - no luck. The only glitch was the fqdn. I corrected that in the config file and everything was happy. Now I'm looking forward to showing the teachers how to use it.

Remote Assistance

I just moved my Mail Server from one ISP to another and I knew some of my teachers would be calling because their email didn't work any more. I was going to do a 30 day trial of goto assist because of its great reviews but didn't want to deal with trying it with the school credit card. I kept looking and found TeamViewer. It's working great. When a teacher calls in asking how to get his/her email working, I can take over their computer and fix it for them.

1. have them Google teamviewer download and go to the page
2. talk them through downloading and running the small program - TeamViewr Quick Support
3. have them give you their id number and password

Linux Domain / File Server

Our Windows 2003 server had major problems last week $$$$. Not good at the end of a school budget. But a perfect opportunity to try Ebox Linux Server. So I put together a Ebox Office server, added the users, copied their files on, and chown -R their directories. So far - working like a champ.

200+ users

Ebox 1.4
I added icewm (windows manager), ivman (hotplug USB), nedit (editor), and nautilus (file manager).

So far - so good I haven't observed it under a heavy load yet but it doesn't look like its going to be a problem.

iPod Touch in the classroom

I just observed a six grade class using iPod Touches for the first time. In very little time they were zipping around exploring the apps I put on and surfing the web. They were easily able to find web pages and resources the teacher asked for. I'm impressed. These are going to be a useful tool for teachers.

Windows 7 voice dictation

I am playing around with voice dictation in windows seven. I am very happy that voice dictation is built into windows. It is one of the few features that I miss when using Linux. So far, I am finding that the accuracy and usability of voice dictation in windows seven is not as good as I have experienced with Microsoft office voice dictation, IBM, or dragon dictate in XP. I am spending a lot more time correcting mistakes than I ever have with previous voice dictation programs. It does however seem to be learning from my corrections. Windows voice dictation does not work with Open Office writer, it does work with Wordpad.

I have used voice dictation with students in the past but only with limited success. Voice dictation does not work as well with immature voices and can be a frustrating experience for students.

Here is a link to an article about getting started with speech recognition in Windows 7.

Frist Class and Linux

I find the First Class email client for Linux to not work as well as I would like. The better solution is to install the Windows client using wine. The best solution is to switch to Google Apps for Education (working on that). The only drawback I find is that web links don't work seamlessly, I have to copy/paste the URL.