Borneo – Travelog

Now for something totally non IT related.
Recently I blogged about travelling to Borneo unplugged. Usually I don’t get into promoting travel destinations but this last trip was a little different.
We took our 6yr old twins with us on their first ‘adventure tourism’ jaunt so it was very cool seeing things through their eyes and I [...]

Travelling ‘Unplugged’

Well back a week from 12 day family holiday in Brunei and Borneo. I made the decision the day before I left that I was going to go ‘unplugged’ …i.e first time in years I wasn’t going to take a laptop …shock ….horror!! Really couldn’t be bothered with having to go through the scanning, on, [...]

Google Apps – Round up

Well biggest decision of this year (at school!!) was what to do with a aging Mail Server and should we go Google School. Finally the decision was really made for me as: 1. Staff and students were already using personal gmail addresses to collaborate on work 2. Richard was pushing, pushing, pushing….. and 3. The [...]

Moodle …the hidden cost of Ownership

The Hidden cost of Moodle use is more than other LMS providers in the New Zealand market ……….YEAH RIGHT!!
Recently the Ministry MLE roadshow visited Tauranga and I had some calls from local teachers who attended asking about the hidden cost of running Moodle in a school as it was indicated that running Moodle could be [...]

Location Manager for PC

One of the big advantages of using a Mac is the built in ‘Location Manager’. It just makes the setting up of Laptops with different network settings easy. Why this is not built into Windows beats me.
But salvation is here!! NetSetMan is a piece of Freeware that allows you to preconfigure your PC for up [...]

Failures?

The final keynote at Ulearn08 Derek showed the following video. Got me thinking just how many IT related ‘failures’ we have had at college…things we have ‘tried’ and just didn’t work, technology that sits in our back storerooms, never to be seen again.
We are very lucky that our boss sees this ‘R&D’ as worthwhile and [...]

Zen and the art of the Virtualisation

Well Xen anyway!!…..One for the System Admins or anybody else who has overall responsibility for the systems at a workplace/school.
I love it when a plan comes together!!!. A few months ago Arron from Totali convinced me to throw caution to the wind and virtualise a number of our servers into one ‘box’. Lots has been [...]

Laptops – What are the issues

Lots has been said re how education is changing with laptops as affordable as they are becoming. We at Katikati College have now had laptops available on a student by student basis for over a year and are now considering removing some of our specialist IT rooms in favour of continuing to increase the number [...]

Extract Flash animations from Powerpoint

One of our teachers came recently to us with a problem…..how do you extract flash files from a premade Powerpoint?
This ended being a major problem as I could find no easy gui application so have put together the following instructions using an exe file I found on the net:
Extract Flash Files from PowerpointStep 1

Download the [...]

Security vs Learning?

I couple of weeks ago Richard and I were in the interesting position of providing ‘technical support’ for the Learning@Schools conference. I say interesting as it really brought home to me the battle educators have in ‘taming’ the ‘IT Guys’ that control the systems in their schools.
All 1200 participants brought their TELA laptop and were [...]