Looks like the iAudio U2 may be a great small device for students who want to record class lectures (thanks, Miguel). We currently use iPods with iTalks for this. The iAudio is a much less expensive solution ($100) that appears to have similar organizational and transfer capabilities. I’d like to give it a try at CGS.
I learned today that Office 2007 Student/Teacher Edition will not include Outlook, the personal information manager that most people use as their desktop email client. This is too bad, because just as of Exchange Server 2003, it became possible to use Outlook from off-campus to connect to an Exchange Server through port 80. Mac Entourage users have had this ability since Server 2000 and Office 2004 SP2 (or was it SP1?). Managing email through a real email client is far more efficient and powerful than using a web interface, even more highly rated ones such as Outlook Web Access and GMail. We were just starting to work on increasing penetration of this critical feature to home users. The Office Student/Teacher edition used to be my standard recommendation for home users. Now, I suspect that they will either purchase a more expensive version or continue to rely on web access.
CGS (my new school) has a student laptop program at the high school level. Since families own the machines, I will need to find out more about Microsoft’s licensing policies for school-owned laptop programs. If Microsoft permits the school to count these computers in its licensing scheme and install Microsoft products, then we will be able to install Office Professional and eliminate that problem for the laptop program students. However, that still doesn’t help parents or middle school students at home. One question: since OneNote is replacing Outlook in Office 2007, what will Microsoft do for the next version of Office for the Mac?
p.s. The article suggests that people may struggle to adapt to the new tabbed toolbars interface. Dreamweaver has had this for ages — it works great there.
Our beloved student.user network account graduated today. It first entered the school in the fall of 2002 as a test account for student network privileges. Needing a security group, it joined the new class of 2006. For four years, student.user made its way through the ninth grade curriculum, found a new group of friends during sophomore year, unsuccessfully ran for V.P. of Diversity junior year, and experienced a vicious senior slump this year. College really isn’t in the cards for student.user. We think it is going to take some well-deserved time off and contemplate what to do next. A return to the class of 2010 is pretty much out of the question, since our current practice is to create a student test user account for each class. So, 2008.user and 2009.user are currently making their way through the rigorous UHS program, and the tech department will have many graduations to celebrate in the future. One thing for sure — the tuition payments are killing us!
p.s. Teacher.User appears to be a lifer.
Today, the Class of 2006 graduated from San Francisco University High School. On Monday, I will continue our four-year tradition of disabling the students’ network accounts two days after graduation. This is one of the more unpopular policies I have. Many students would like me to keep the accounts active through the summer, until they have established their college accounts.
Fellow tech directors, what policies do you follow for graduating seniors?
Arguments for closing accounts right away
You don’t attend the school anymore.
You’ve graduated. It’s time to let go and move on.
Acceptable use agreements no longer govern account use.
We need the summer to remove old accounts, reclaim disk space, and establish new accounts.
Email services cannot exist independently of other network services.
Some colleges have already made network accounts available to new students.
Most of you already have personal email accounts.
Take this opportunity to update your UHS Alumni profile with a permanent email address!
Arguments for keeping network accounts active through August
Not all colleges make network accounts available right away.
You deserve the opportunity to reach each other easily before you go to college.
Departing seniors can be trusted to use accounts appropriately for the duration of the summer.
It doesn’t take that much work to perform the necessary account management.
You might use your network accounts to participate in forum discussions.
It’s just plain mean to suspend the accounts right away.
I always prefer installing web scripts on my own web server rather than using an externally-hosted service. I can integrate the authentication, look and feel, and features with the rest of my site. Our intranet stays consolidated — users have one place to go to access all of our web services. We view no advertisements.
For many types of software, the free, open-source options are just as good as the externally hosted ones, free or paid. phpBB is as good as most commercial bulletin boards. Moodle is as good as Blackboard or WebCT. WordPress has as many features as commercial blogging sites. Elgg provides many of the same features as MySpace or Facebook.
Usually, new technologies appear first on commercial sites, and then the open-source world catches up. Sometimes, the lag time is very short, as with blogging and bulletin board software. Other times, the lag time is much longer. The longest delay I can think of is with photo gallery software. Gallery and Coppermine are both very solid, but they lack the tagging and Flash features of Flickr. When will they catch up? Photo galleries are key for an intranet community, taking advantage of the visual medium of a computer screen more than other types of social software. Though both support keywords, captions, and descriptions, allowing anyone to tag a photo simplifies and broadens participation in the process of mining a photo collection for useful purposes.
Another example is del.icio.us, which does not really have an equivalent in the intranet software world. I would love to give a school community the ability to tag web sites anywhere but keep the database internal to the school. Yes, we could preface every del.icio.us tag with our school name, but internal processes are easier to train, customize, and keep free of external noise.
Let me know if you come across open-source Web 2.0 photo gallery or tagging software.
I officially have one more month to work at University High School. I will spend the first week of July at NECC in San Diego, and then drive from Oakland to Portland to start my new job at Catlin Gabel on July 10. Ironically, the students participated in Closing Exercises today, during which they said goodbye to departing faculty members. Tomorrow, our faculty will do the same. Aren’t I supposed to be finished before people say goodbye? Good thing I have more time, I guess, because there is a lot to do. The work always goes faster when school is closed.
I celebrated the end of the year by installing mySQL on the new web server. However, PHP couldn’t load the mySQL extension correctly for some reason. I have a week to resolve problems like that and then get all of the services running. Then we will take down the old servers and launch the new ones. The new web server will be probably be live by June 12, but since school will be out of session, I will have the luxury of freezing the old web site and migrating all of the scripts and data over a couple of weeks’ time. I hope to reserve the final week to unbind my user account from all of the mail notification and permissions settings it holds, then [set up a mail autoresponder to reply to mail messages for a few weeks. Eventually, I will completely disable the mailbox but keep the network account in order to provide scripting support next year when needed.
I have been giving more thought to my NECC presentation on culturally strategic development of a school intranet. The move to a different school helps, because I have to think carefully about what components of the UHS intranet will work well at Catlin Gabel, and which should be installed first. My first reaction is that CGS makes it a point to trust students with responsibility, so there likely will not be a negative reaction to unmoderated spaces such as discussion forums and photo galleries. My second thought is that a school that emphasizes its community spirit would probably want more community features on the home page, such as a random photo from the gallery. Then again, random photos may be too context-independent for an intranet home page.
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Technology and Learning Innovation at Catlin Gabel School in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
@kassissieh on Twitter
Site content does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Catlin Gabel School.
