The download went fine but when I tried to change format I continued to get errors. As this had never happened to me before I did some research and found that since YouTube went HD any of the videos uploaded recently have a  slightly different .flv format which seems designed to stop conversion.

After trying a number of different ways around this issue (converting using ffmpeg and DownloadHelper itself etc) I managed to ‘crack’ it by doing the following:

Downloaded using MacTubes as .mp4
Converted to .wmv using Visualhub

Students then very happy

Why strive to provide Ultra Fast Broadband in NZ Schools? While I totally agree with the following points made at the meeting:

While all schools understand their own community best, often there is nobody in the school that understands ICT infrastructures and how they relate to the successful implementation of learning in the school. Consequently, this job is left to the IT Technician or some classroom teacher with an interest or some ‘spare’ time. This often results in schools spending large amounts of $$$ to the vendor with the flashiest solution rather than the one that is best fit for both the school and the staff who will need to use it. Talking to schools, they are continually pelted with sales promotions for IWB’s, Software solutions, LMs’s, E-Portfolio solution, Phone solutions, wireless access etc etc etc ….and now its all the companies trying to sign schools up to fibre as fast as possible before the overall fibre Tender is announced in October.

I believe the most important aspect of the meeting last week was the Ministry basically asking for a mandate from schools to look at tendering for the ongoing cost of Fibre access to the school PLUS the data used. While this would come out of our bulk grants, the pricing they would be able to get for 2300+ schools would have to be better than we can get individually!! Our meeting unanimously ‘passed’ for this to happen so if we are willing to do this then perhaps the climate is right to put back into place some Educational IT specialists with geographic ‘regions of responsibility’ who are not advisors but individuals employed by the Ministry (maybe from ‘tagged staffing’) with the responsibility for liaising between the schools and vendors and who have the responsibility of ‘ticking off’ major IT purchases for ALL schools in the area. This would allow them to organise regional tenders for all the items that schools are presently trying to buy ….and due to ‘economy  of scale’ the deals the schools would get would be a major financial win.

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 asked them when we got home “what where their favourite bits of the trip” …as they lined up with mine I decided to share them:

1. Visiting Selingan Turtle Island, snorkeling with reef fish and staying overnight to watch Green turtles come in and lay their eggs and then watch a release of baby turtles ..laid 45 days before. This was also really special as we got to see and be involved with anatural turtle hatching during the day (somehing basically unheard of) …very cool see video here
2. Visiting the Sepelok Orangatuan Rehabilitation centre …where we watched the Orangatuans be feed .got watched by another and ‘adopted‘ a baby one for the princely sum of $90 NZ a year!
3. Taking a boat ride up the Kinabatangan river to see Probiscis monkeys and lots of other wildlife and staying overnight up in the jungle itself.
4. Going into the Gomantong cave and seeing the bats, and swallows and watching mum freak out about the guano and the cochroaches!
5. Swimmimg at the Sepilok Jungle Resort in 34degrees while Dad and Mum had a beer

…and it was so damm cheap !!(and I felt safer than in Auckland) $3000 for 6 days for 4 people …including all food, drinks accommodation and travel ..if you are interested in this sort of experience I would really reccomend it and I must make a plug for our guide for the six days as he was great and looked after our family. His contact details are below if you would like to contact him directly for a customised tour:

Casey Omar Zulkarnai
Nature Tour Guide
mar_cassey@yahoo.com

I learn’t a few things while away …

1. iPhones are marvelous ..kept up with twitter, kept up with news on the net, laughed at the weather back here, talked with friends on skype ….in fact more connected than at home!

2. I had some significant misconceptions re how easy it would to be online in Borneo ….I got off the plane ..full 3G coverage (thank goodness I’d turned off data roaming ..$10 per MB would have killed the bank balance) …Both in Brunei and Sabah Malaysia every resturant we went into had free wifi ….something I never thought would be the case ..just showed my misunderstanding really.

3. We have lousy phone signal here in NZ. We drove 3.5 hours up into the interior of Borneo up to the Kinabatangan River then went up the river for 1.5 hours to view the wildlife (Probiscis Monkeys, Wild Oranguatuans etc) and my phone STILL had signal …in fact I had to turn it off so it didn’t scare the wildlife and I so I didn’t get thrown overboard!! ..I still lose signal as I travel from Home to school each day (it must be more remote!!).

So next time I’m looking forward to a another laptop free trip !!

Borneo

So after deciding that educationally it was a good idea to move all 1200 users and even if we decided to move to another mail server we were going to have to migrate everything anyway ….we did it!

Was it painful ……?
Tech side ……well not really it takes a couple of hours to setup the correct settings from the gmail, then some mucking with dns entries to get everything pointing the right way, then email away to them to get recognised as a educational institute ….tech side done.
School side …..Migrating users especially email inboxes etc would be painful but we just talked to the staff said that we would run the old mail server in parallel for a month and they were to look at this as a good chance to clean up their email. This went down fine with the understanding that we were happy to work with them to make this transition as easy as possible. This worked well and we have had no issues with this approach at all.

Problems

• IMAP speed issues with attachments ….none? ..others have noted this but we haven’t ..not sure why not ..must just be lucky!!! LOL
• Gmail doesn’t like to be ‘polled’ continously ( seems to think its an attack)  so by limiting how often this happens this has disappeared.
• Gmail uses flash to upload multiple attachments and this proved to be an issue with our internal proxy …took a bit of ‘tweaking’ but all sorted and staff now happy.
• Issue with syncing user information between our LDAP (AD) server and GApps is a ongoing one ..we have found this application works well from Google ..for all things except passwords due to the format AD stores them. So we are manually having to do this. Anybody with magic bullet cure for this …let me know!

Positives

• Email is reliable, spam is better than before and virus protection built in …all great!
• Educationally staff are continuing to find ways of uses collaborative tools weekly ..if not daily …from class projects to faculty planning …again great!
• We haven’t had to replace a dodgy server!!

Concerns

• Bandwidth is important …bring on the Loop with pairing to Google!! We have 12mbs down and 5mbs up ..and its working damm well ..less might be an issue
• Data Caps …. we have noticed an increase in data use as classes are using Google docs to work collaboratively ….but surely well worth it educationally and it will take something like 2 years to equal the cost of a new server …even if we were to double our internet usuage!!

Some ‘Comments’ I have heard…

• Why would you want to use Google Apps and give them your data – they are just another Microsoft in sheeps clothing – looking at world domination!! – I just don’t see that as the case …its a free service and it works great lets use it!!!
• Who ‘owns’ your email/docs? …personally I don’t care !! ..cloud computing is a concept we need to understand …you back up what is necessary but otherwise its very convienent ..and I’m all for that!
• what happens if Google goes belly up ….HELLO …if Google goes down I think we will have more to worry about than our email!!!

Well must believe in it ..I’ve now ‘helped’ migrate six schools and this is the full ’round up’

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 more expensive than one of the commercial vendors (eg Knowledgenet or Ultranet). I decided to sit down and work out :

1. How much has it cost our college to run it

2. How much does commercial support cost

so………

Costs for us to run it at Katikati College, Roll 950.

Hardware -well we started using it 6 years ago on a rebuilt old Pentium box which we then moved last year to generic server that runs Moodle and our static website with raided 300GB drives and 4GB RAM (as a virtual machine ..so we can easily move/backup it) …hardware cost : $3500

Software – runs on Ubuntu Server (free) , Moodle …well free

Time to set it up: Well initial set up took Richard and I maybe an hour the first time (including server install)

Time to maintain: Richard would be lucky if he spends 2 hours per month …and most of that’s adding new modules he likes the look of or adding functionality.

Time to train staff: Hmm …the big one …well that’s been huge but its just been seen as part of the PD we would provide for any new system we bring into our college that adds value….so actual cost $0

Commercial Support

So if you don’t feel happy to do this yourself I found a number of companies that actually specialise in Moodle installation, support , training and hosting (no pesky servers onsite). Try Catalyst (Ministry development partner) or Totali ….just 2 of many companies that offer cost effective solutions for Moodle.

What do we need to compare this to?

Well Knowledgenet has its pricing on its website

For Katikati College:

Install cost : $6600+GST

Monthly Cost : $336.67 +GST

So to be fair there is no hardware cost at all but it would cost our college $11000.00 the first year then $4400 per year after that!! …..sorry I just don’t see the added value!! In fact recently at the KAMAR conference Richard stated that for the install cost alone he would maintain a Moodle installation for life!! (feel free to email him!!).

Sure I’ve heard the comment that Moodle is not as ‘easy to use’ as other LMS’s ..I really dispute that …it all depends on the level of commitment to Professional Development your school is willing to put into implementing a Learning Management System ..and isn’t that the same for any ‘new’ initiative in a school ?

Finally for all you doubters out there have a look at this http://docs.moodle.org/en/Top_10_Moodle_Myths

Thought it really sums it up as I think just because Moodle has no company actively marketing it in NZ we in the education sector does not make it any less relevant or applicable?

Finally Moodle has over 20 000 registered installations worldwide ..all in areas with multiple LMS’s available …can that many people really be wrong?

]]> http://tek.net.nz/2009/05/moodle-the-hidden-cost-of-ownership/feed/ 5 http://tek.net.nz/2008/11/location-manager-for-pc/ http://tek.net.nz/2008/11/location-manager-for-pc/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:38:54 +0000 Kelvin http://tek.net.nz/?p=430 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 to 6 locations with every network setting you can imagine. Its easy to set up and even easier to use….a very cool find.

We are very lucky that our boss sees this ‘R&D’ as worthwhile and makes it ‘ok’ and I think its important that we all go ‘easy’ on ourselves and recognise failure as just one part of the research process in the journey.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRTGeCZNgAs[/youtube]

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 said re the advantages of doing this

1. Limiting your power usage and therefore carbon footprint
2. Less ‘black boxes’ to replace
3. Lower overall cost of ownership etc

But for me the big advantage was the idea that I could ‘export’ each machine and import them onto another in case of hardware failure (We have kept many of our services on Mac servers as this can be done easily with them). I was not convinced this would work!!!

So on Friday I bought a cheap ‘box’ with the following specifications for a cost of well less than $1000NZ with the following specs:

Intel® Core 2 Duo 3.16GHz 6MB Cache 1333MHz FSB 45nm #E8500
Asus P5KPL-CM Mainboard
2 x A-Data 2GB DDR-2 800 Memory totalling 4GB’s
Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 SATAII NCQ
Asus DRW-2014 DVD Writer

It took less than 15mins to load Xen server by Citrix and install a working copy of our Active Directory from an image…..Pure magic….especially as presently we are running the free version on XenServer only. This is the sorts of things that makes me as System Admin with a Technical staff of 1 and 400+ machines to maintain, sleep a lot more soundly.

A truly Zen Like moment!

Our laptop programme which is available to all students on an hour by hour basis (booked by staff) and has been a huge success ..it has changed our school without it being only the ‘well off’ that can afford for their kids to have laptops. We blatantly stole this idea from Arthur Phillip High School in Sydney and it has totally changed our school with IT being utilised as a tool to support the curriculum without the pressure for it to be used all the time. But there has been some things we have worked out along the way…….

1. Before you have lots of laptops ..get your wireless right..we didn’t have 10′s of thousands of $$$ to buy a commercial solution to full wireless coverage. We have had full wireless coverage of our site for over 5 years but we have had to upgrade from basic units to Cisco 1131 units to get the coverage we need. This is an absolute MUST if you want to run more than half a dozen laptops off an access point and at $1000NZ while not cheap we have found we can support 70 off one unit well. Recently we completed a online survey on Moodle with all of our staff off one access point ..no problem

2. None of the laptops we have found are designed to run (with a standard battery) for anywhere near 5 hours so heavy booking creates major issues later in the day ..this is an issue that needs to be addressed within your school …we have solved it with laptops that get ‘rotated’ into service later in the day

3. Laptops aren’t heavy on their own but if you have someone issuing them …100 is heavy especially if they are being issued every hour!!

4. Security..Security ..Security …where do you house 200 laptops?

5. We have designed charging cows for 70 laptops. This require 3 phase power ..this is expensive to put in.

6. Dont let your technician take personally any software changes done to laptops by students …we just reimage any machine that does not look ‘standard’ any time spent trying to ‘fix’ problems created by students is time wasted (We use G4U – its free and works well). If the damage is sorted we have found they generally don’t bother to do it again as thats not the ‘game’ ..just like vandalism to buildings.

Other than these issues .its all been plain sailing!!