Archive for September 2006

BAISnet's Killer Apps

Posted by: rkassissieh
September292006

BAISnet is the Bay Area Independent Schools Network, a very active community of education technology professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. One member recently asked the question, "what are today's killer apps?" The responses included some items I would like to explore for the first time.

iStopMotion, for simple animation and slow motion

ComicLife, for easy portfolio and digital yearbook creation

Tinkerplots, for representing information visually

Scratch, for programming in the early years

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Inexpensive Fundraising Software for Maru-a-Pula

Posted by: rkassissieh
September272006

I provide a fair bit of technology advice and web site support to Maru-a-Pula School in Botswana, at which I taught in the 90's. My latest adventure is helping them improve their alumni/fundraising effort through the acquisition of fundraising software and development of a new alumni web site.

Today, I did a little research on fundraising software options. I found three articles helpful in this regard:

Selecting Fundraising Software

Inexpensive Donor Databases

Forum discussion: Raiser's Edge

In addition, I visited the web sites of a number of inexpensive fundraising products and marked ones that looked promising to me. I don't have direct experience with any of these. Do you?

Exceed! Basic ($499 MSRP, $299 at TechSoup)

GiftWorks ($35 at TechSoup)

eBase (Mac/Win, free software, fee-for-service costs, runs on FileMaker
Server)

Nonprofitbooks ($1,000)

Fund Raiser Select ($1,500)

Please let me know if you have experience with any of these or know people who do!

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Copying From iPod to Computer

Posted by: rkassissieh
September262006

We regularly wipe and reinstall software on student laptop computers, but we do not copy music collections as a matter of policy. We believe that most students have illegal copies of music files on their family-owned computers, and we should not knowingly store such files on our servers or pass them through our network. While this causes a headache for many students (who has 20GB free on another computer to back up their music?), it's our current policy and practice.

iPod copy utilities make this transition easier. If a student has a copy of their music collection on their iPod, they can copy it back to the computer after the imaging work is complete. I haven't use them before, but here are three popular utilities for mac that I found online. One is cross-platform. Another one is free. Does anyone have experience with these in order to know which is best?

iPodRip

PodUtil

Yamipod

It's too bad that Apple's policies make it difficult for some users to perform legitimate file backup operations, in an attempt to block illegal file copying.

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