But I digress, In doing so I found that the blog needed updating which thanks to the Automatic Update plugin is simply a matter of clicking on a few buttons so I did it and woah Wordpress looks completely different on the backend as you can see from this picture. One of the features that got me started straight away and did this post on was the quickpost area where you can blog right on the dashboard, no more clicks.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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.

iMac hdd install on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

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.

We went back after visiting here in 2006 and to be honest we stole their great idea of school owned laptops. It is nice to see the contrast between the Australia and NZ education systems and Lynne, the principal at APHS certainly gave us the grand tour, in fact we went back on the Tuesday to have a look at their new literacy programme as this is something we will be looking at Implementing in 2008 but more on that in the next post. We even got to show off the wiimote boards which was to be the only time in Australia that anyone was interested. I guess that when all your students have laptops the need for teacher directed learning is somewhat lessened.

The up side to this is that google do try and use that information for good.   Not only do they provide excellent services but they also help humanity.  Google can now predict, with reasonable accuracy, where flu breakouts will occur 2 weeks ahead of the Centre for Disease Control using search results. Link to NY Times article.

Speaking of excellent services, Google has just released Sketchup 7 3D modelling software.  Sketchup is available in free and paid versions for OSX and Windows and is by far the best beginners 3D software.

Finally for the more geeky of you out there, Google labs have developed a tool for more controls over IMAP mail.  I use three devices for checking mail, desktop, laptop and iPod Touch and IMAP is the most convenient method. However each time I check my mail, using Apple mail.app, it would spend a good few minutes downloading spam from the server to my computer.  Now you can choose which folders get downloaded and which stay on the server, ideal if you are using iPhone 3G to cut down data transfer over 3G connection.  Check out the Lifehacker article.

I guess we should be used to innovation as the quote below demonstrates but I have to say my Delicious links are getting somewhat out of hand (thanks to achurches for keeping them coming though) but I do look forward to the challenges that the next few months will bring.

History Now. The Historians Perspective via kwout