This map collection from the University of Texas includes 11,000 high-quality map images, most of which are in the public domain. This is incredibly useful for educational purposes. It's tough to burrow through the Google results for "free maps," which includes advertisements and low-quality outline maps. While you can use Google Earth for educational purposes, this collection is better when you need quick access to one country, a complete set of geographical landmarks, or a map that you can publish on a public web site.

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection


source

A few months after first considering the idea, I introduced podcasting by phone to the upper school today. Why start here when our students and teachers already have laptops? Because it adds something to our program that is qualitatively different and we don't already do. Our teachers already post a few audio files online, and that aspect of our work will grow. However, most of the podcasting that interests students the most does not happen in class or when they have their laptops. It happens when the students are at athletic events, on outdoor education field trips, and traveling abroad. Will they call into the toll-free number and update the rest of the school community? We will find out.

Podcasting by phone may have greater direct application to school business in the middle and lower school divisions. The middle school is already very excited about conventional podcasting. The seventh grade group applied for and received a grant to set up a podcasting infrastructure. They have already recorded one set of complete science class presentations and are planning on world cultures, music, and weekly assemblies. It would be a pretty short jump to carry this enthusiasm to off-campus events. The lower school was already interested in podcasting student book reports, and they might go for podcast-by-phone field trip reports on their annual overnight.

I am fully prepared for this to either completely take off and become really big or not get too far. It is fun to live with this uncertainty and then be surprised (one way or the other) when time has passed and the results become clear.

Oh, by the way. I settled on GabCast, for its toll-free number, relatively large storage quota, multi-episode Flash-based player, and support for multiple channels.

I spent an hour with a teacher today doing one of my favorite things -- choosing a technology to meet the goals of a class project. The project is a set of essays on cultural objects for a globalization class. Cultural objects are popular items that have achieved world recognition -- Coca-Cola, Ronald McDonald, and so on. We quickly settled on wiki technology, and within the course of a day, I moved from the Moodle wiki activity module to MediaWiki and finally to DokuWiki.

I had been there before at my previous school. In my limited experience, DokuWiki is more appropriate for schools than MediaWiki. I got DokuWiki installed more quickly, bound to LDAP, and configured for use. It is also simpler to use for beginners. MediaWiki is still the gold standard for wiki software, but they make no bones about how it is designed for the Wikipedia site. Its features are not necessarily ideal for a school site with lots of beginner users. Moodle wiki looks fine within the context of Moodle, but the image upload feature is broken for student users and the diff feature falls far short of the DokuWiki version. DokuWiki also supports email and RSS subscription! Rock on.

Let the project begin!

The upper school newspaper, Catlin Speak, is now online. Check out the Drupal-powered, student-run publication.

We have spent the last few weeks gradually rolling out a new helpdesk system for tech support requests. We needed to handle this delicately, as our small independent school prides itself on personal touch and informality. However, we badly needed a good way to ensure that support requests are visible to all tech staff and no requests fall through the cracks. In the past, we needed to spend weekly meeting time checking in on the status of previous requests.

One key to resolving this apparent dichotomy between our department's and our users' needs has been to ensure that users automatically receive copies of internal correspondence related to a user's case. Any time we add information to a support request history, such as assigning it to one of us, performing some research, or sending a unit our for repair, we note it in the helpdesk system and the user automatically receives a copy. This is a much higher frequency of communication than we were able to manage in the past. Finally, the email templates themselves are highly modifiable, which is more important than it sounds. I joke that adding a Catlin "tree" will greatly increase people's comfort with the system.

Since we already had Altiris as our Windows deployment solution, we simply activated the HelpDesk component. As I'm usually not a big fan of proprietary, unmodifiable solutions, I was pleased to find that this one pretty much gets the job done. All of the categories and queues are customizable, and it integrates with LDAP and Altiris' inventory system out of the box. That's a lot more than I could write on my own in Perl within a reasonable amount of time!