The Educated Kiwi
Hardware
iPads in Schools
Sep 2nd
If you are wondering if it is worth rolling out iPads in your school check out Fraser Speirs blog. Fraser has journalled his experiences in removing computer labs and replacing them with iPads.
iPad first thoughts
Apr 15th
Well thanks to the Tauranga Apple Centre I had a brief play with an iPad today. I even got to take it home to see what Mrs van Dijk thought of it. My thoughts- I was really excited by the idea of the iPad largely for my daughter, at three she already uses the mouse and loves reading books and generally playing on the computer. The iPad seemed more natural for her as she is very happy with Dr Seuss on my iPhone. Alas apart from native iPad apps most of the sites my daughter like to use like starfall are flash based.
This is a huge minus for the iPad and would stop me getting one personally as i’m quite happy reading things on my phone and the lack of flash on a smaller device is not so noticeable. It makes me think that Apple is expecting people to spend the money on iPads and the app store. Now if only they released a model for schools that was flash enabled. Then I could see us getting a few as alternatives to laptops.
Wiimotes and Plasma Screens
Aug 10th
It may not be pretty but this is the modified TEK irpen that we have used for making a plasma screen interactive. The reasoning behind this came from having to put a wiimote in a year one classroom and the projector giving an image that kids would be too short for. So with a slight modification of the pen (we found that the glass on the plasma screen was too reflective in this case for an accurate reading) we were away. As you can see from the photo below the boys found it easy to use and were happily using the big computer monitor to write on ( they are playing echalk).
I guess I will have to add an update to this after a few field trials but we like the idea and with the price of Plasma screen so low at the moment it is a real option for class and hey there are no shadows. Just the thing to complement those Dell Latitude 2100 netbooks $1,046 NZD for a touch screen. Or $1500 for a Samsung 42 inch plus $400 for a wiimote kit hmmm I guess it’s lucky I already have a laptop.
The Playstation 3 is for Educational Research Dear…
Apr 23rd
Yeah Right!
These days you have to keep up with the kids. Ironically Playstation was the first console to be marketed at 20 somethings with expendable income hence its success and the playstation 3 is no exception with its price tag. I bit the bullet and the GE money genie bought me a PS3 and Guitar Hero World Tour (with guitar, drums and mic) on tick. After some hard practicing I took the gear round to Richards house for an evening of home made wine and rock and roll.
The game itself is fairly straight forward, choose an instrument, skill level and a song, play individual or as a band and away you go. Beginner skill level just requires you to keep a beat with the strum bar (guitar) or tapping a beat on any part of the drum kit and if you have never done it before even this is quite challenging for an entire song. Crank it up to easy and it gets quite intense with medium almost impossible without considerable practice.
Playing as an individual is great fun but playing as a band is even better and if someone makes too many mistakes then the band gets booed off the stage. I even had a go at playing drums and singing at the same time Phil Collins style which was extremely challenging but I managed to get to the end of Band on the Run.
Of course with a room consisting of 75% teachers we saw huge educational value amongst all of the fun and thoughts wander to how it may be used in a classroom. We also wandered if we could hook the wireless drum kit up to Garage Band and sure enough you can – just download Gamepad Companion and map the drum pads to keystrokes and use it with the on screen keyboard to play the drums on your mac. And even though the guitar playing isn’t as authentic as the drums, as a guitar player myself I could see it helping with strumming patterns, rhythm and muscle control (especially little finger fretting which I tend to avoid).
There are a whole lot of skills involved in this game and it is one of the few games that doesn’t annoy me when I get killed. Maybe it is because there are some great rock songs, we all certainly found the drumming very satisfying and decided that it was more fun than singstar because of the team element.
I would love to see one hooked up to a projector in a music department with students learning to appeciate good rock music instead of that crap they listen to these days.
KKC Network
Mar 26th
Often we get asked how our school network is put together so I thought I would share our diagram thanks to lovely charts.
Clasus Challenge IWB pricing
Feb 25th
Clasus is a Portuguese company that sell Interactive Whiteboards that look like Promethean IWBs, act like Promethean IWBs and are Promethean IWBs under a different name (allegedly). Screenflex (no web site as yet) are the Irish company attempting to sell these boards for, in their words, “about a grand and a half less than Promethean.” Screenflex made their name by challenging a ruling that Promethean Ireland had. This rule was the only way one could use ActivStudio, (Promethean’s software), was with a Promethean board.
After ignoring Promethean’s self-made rule, Screenflex shipped the Clasus with Promethean software anyway. When they were “threatened” with legal action, the guys checked out the law books (and the head of Promethean UK) and a quick U-turn from Promethean occurred. This is why I really liked these guys. They have found a product that is basically a clone of Promethean and are selling it with the software and trying to save us teachers a few quid.
via Anseo.net.
Wiimote Software and sync on HP
Feb 1st
h2. Select the bluetooth device
Click on the bluetooth emblem in the bottom right. the first time you will have to click next to add the device and select the services. You can install all of them depending on how you wish to use your bluetooth but most can be ignored.
h2. Adding the device
click next
h2. Search for devices
Push the wiimote connect button. You will now see all the students cellphones as well as the Nintendo RVL-CNT-01, Select it then click next
h2. Bluetooth Pairing
here lies the problem the wiimote does not pair so we click skip
h2. Finish
click finish and the wiimote will be connected
h2. Connection
now that it is connected and do be aware that the lights should still be flashing on the wiimote you can go ahead and lauch the wiimote software.
h2. Software running
You will need to re add the device if it loses connection as it does not pair with the hardware.
iMac 17inch hdd install made easy with youtube
Dec 8th
So after we upgraded our home iMac we passed our old one on to Natalies parents which after six months required a rebuild as the drive was corrupted. I should have know the death bell was ringing but reformatted and reinstalled instead.
Then as I leave for Australia Nat rings saying it’s died again and they need it for the NCEA exam timetable that my Mother in law supervises. Bugger. So with fear in my head I thought here is a dead logic board but being well out of warranty I decided little was to be lost from replacing the internal hard drive.
The photo below shows the innards on the dining room table as I followed this video on you tube. Great after five minutes it was apart. Then off to the shop for a new 250gb SATA drive for $150 and put it in, reversed the process and began reinstalling the OS. Now all thats required is to see what I can rescue with disk warrior on the old drive. But once the iMac is out of warranty it certainly makes this an easy option for schools with these machines, especially for media where a 1tb drive could go nicely.
KKC Laptop Programme
Nov 27th
Recently had an email which asked some good questions thought I might reply here as well for everyones benefit.
To answer your Questions
What are you using as the laptops? – full size, or netbooks? How many do you have, and what size school?
We are using a fifty/fifty mix of mac/pc all fullsize we have 120 at the moment and growing to 200 by next year. They are all full size right through to some 17inch machines. We also have 5 computer suites plus a further 7 in each year 7/8 room for 945 students. The machines are second hand, Two year old from Equico which we budget on $700 per unit with a new battery but to be honest with the price of laptops this has come down to a stage where we can almost buy new.
I presume you have sufficient wireless coverage in the school to allow them to be used anywhere?
We have full wireless coverage using Cisco access points. These are not centrally managed due to cost but are $900 per unit and we have 14 of them which gives us pretty good coverage. 70+ machines can run comfortably off each.
What sort of damage rate is there? – do you have to limit which students can borrow them? What process is in place for keeping them running.
The only damage in the past year and a half was when the technician dropped one. We get nervous on rainy days when students use them as umbrellas. Any student can borrow them seniors at anytime of day juniors require a teacher booking. The pc’s authenticate with active directory so are reasonably locked down to basic apps (word,firefox etc) the macs are a very open user which allows saving to local machine etc to enable multimedia usage without any hassles. We simply re-image these machines when we have a problem, which has been once this year for three machines. We really have a high trust model here and the students understand the value of the equipment, to be honest we get more damage in the rooms where the students are not responsible for the machines. Basically the process is: students come to Library after teacher has booked laptops on KAMAR and then student ID card and laptop are scanned and they take them away to class returning at the end of the period.
Any other fishhooks?
Someone to hand them out, you get a very sore arm lifting 200+ laptops an hour. Ongoing cost of maintaining them (which we have the same person doing).
Please if you wish to find out more contact us, we are only to happy to share how we have done things.
Making the TEK irpen for wiiboard
Nov 3rd
Here is a quick 3x speed video of Mark making an irpen. Feel free to comment and ask questions if you need any further help making your own. Or you can buy one by clicking on the link on this blog. If you need to see it in higher quality follow the link to you tube where there is the option of HQ.
IR Pens
Oct 29th
I have finally got a production model of my IR pen and am just waiting for a shipment of the Vishay TSAL6400 IR LED’s from the US.
So far I have been using the IR LED from an Apple remote which works far better than any others I have sourced in NZ.
I have the manufacturing process down to about 15 minutes which means the sales cost will be around NZ $25. (Not sure about postage yet)
If you would like to pre-order pens to go with the Wiimote board email me at irpen@tek.net.nz
Wiimote whiteboard roundup
Oct 21st
So we have had our first week of having the wiimote in a class at Katikati College. Next week we deploy to another eight classrooms across the cluster as well as three at Omokoroa No 1 School. So far we have built some of our own pens and brought some from penteractive.us who were very happy to send them out to us. I still prefer our own pens largely due to the button and slightly larger size of the pen. There are several other vendors for the pens out there and they can be found on the wiimote whiteboard page.
Also for schools interested in this the wiimote for schools how to is a good place to start. For the software to run the boards I have been using Uwe Schmidt‘s on the mac and Boonjin’s Smoothboard on PC. The smoothboard software is great for the extra functions as it makes the area outside the board useful for backspace return etc as well as a host of functions for google earth and sketchup. The next step for us will be an instructional video on how to make the pens. If you would like a demo and live close enough let us know and if you really don’t want to get you hands dirty we can organise a ready to install kit for you where the wiimote is mains powered and the button for syncing with bluetooth is extended to the front of the classroom.
New MacBooks, but what is Apple thinking?
Oct 15th
I had waited expectantly for today’s announcement of new MacBook and MacBook Pro computers. They look sleek, shiny and elegant like one would expect from apple. Alas there is a hidden catch, the MacBook Pro has dropped firewire 400 in favour of firewire 800, that in itself is no particularly big deal, some different cables will pretty much take care of it for most people or there is an adapter for the express port. The MacBook now has no firewire port at all and I cannot help but wonder what that will mean for schools and for the future of the MacBook in the TELA programme.
You may recall that the first TELA MacBooks were the top of the range black models, that was because they had a hard drive big enough to meet the minimum specifications for the TELA programme which the lower cost models did not. Is Firewire a requirement for a laptop to be offered under the TELA programme? If anyone knows a definitive answer on that then I would love to know.
But what about the schools (and others) that have an investment in firewire equipment? Lots of schools have firewire video cameras and hard drives. This seems like a bad step, and one that will likely annoy more than a few people.
Then one has to wonder, if they dropped firewire on the MacBook, does that mean that they will also drop it on the Mac Mini? What about the iMac range when it gets the next update?
I guess we will all get over it in the course of time, but buying gear that still works just fine but cannot be plugged into your computer always sucks.
wiimote, so easy
Oct 15th
To further advertise the simplicity of using the wiimote pens this video shows my Two year old daugther using the wiimote irpens on the projector in the lounge. She now loves standing on the toy box and drwing on the wall. good one dad 
Download music to your mobile phone – MusicStation – Vodafone NZ
Sep 25th
MusicStation is just $2.50 a week for unlimited access to over one million songs. There are no data charges so that’s all you pay
Ok so I can download megs and megs of music but I want to upload one photo and you charge me $1 for 10 mb a day. Just how much does data really cost you Vodafone?
Download music to your mobile phone – MusicStation – Vodafone NZ
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