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.
I spent the day on a brain / thinking skills course with some colleagues. One of the first activities involved us lining up in 2 teams either side of a wall and on the count of three a person from each side stepped into the doorway and stated the other persons name. The last person to say the name joined the other team. I had a severe disadvantage as I am new to the school and did not know everyones name but I quickly picked it up by listening to the others. After losing my first go I had to join the other team and I noticed that I could see the entire outside team in the reflection of the glass in the door after which I was undefeatable, and I found it quite amusing watching the other team rearranging themselves to confuse me.
A similar situation occurred while I was on the TRCC conference in Wellington when we had a quiz after our meal in the Macs Brewery bar. The bar has free WiFi for customers and I was checking and sending emails on my iPod Touch. When it came to the quiz google came in very handy answering some of the questions and needless to say our team won. No one said there were rules against using the internet but our team clearly had an unfair advantage.
The thing was in both situations it felt that it was unfair against the others. In school I would probably be punished for cheating but in business I may be praised for using my initiative to gain advantage over competitors. I can’t help feeling slightly guilty but also slightly smug at the same time.
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.
Well the sun came out at last and what a successful event the mower day was this year. Huge crowds and some awesome racing. Now I can look forward to seeing the footage as we put together the video of the event. I have to say the mowers were faster this year than ever before with top speeds of around 50kmph down the home straight and some serious drifting on the corners.
Omokoroa No. 1 School Ride on mower action
I really felt the community got together at the event and we even had a number of the local candidates for the upcoming eloection racing in the “celebrity race” and then to top it all off Nat and I won our bid on the silent auction for a great piece of artwork. What a way to donate money to the school, fantastic.
As you can see from the Image below we have begun our transition to Google School. Our initial reason was we see no point in going to ms exchange and find squirrel mail inadequate so why not try google. But then of course this gives us the benefits of having each student seeing a unified homepage (Google can lock down the gadgets kids can add to an EDU set) and every student has their mail,documents and website at their fingertips.
Customising it has been easy as uploading a couple of images and now it’s just the process of pointing our Domain at the right place and we go live. I will blog the results of the full student and staff transition in the next few weeks.
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
Ok a blatant ad for teamviewer but for those of you who need to support family or friends and sometimes it would just be easier to show them rather than guess where their mouse is I have found teamviewer very fast and effective. You simply install the full version on your computer and they install the client. It then gives them a password which you enter on your computer and away you go.
I still use logmein for my family as then I can log into Mum and Dad’s machine at night to run the antivirus and updates but for one off support I find Teamviewer much easier for those on the other end.
TeamViewer is the fast, simple and friendly solution for remote access over the Internet - all applications in one single, very affordable module:
Instantly take control over a computer anywhere on the Internet, even through firewalls. No installation required, just use it fast and secure.
TeamViewer can also be used to present your desktop to a partner on the Internet. Show and share your software, PowerPoint presentations etc.
Share your files, chat, switch the direction during a teamwork session, and a lot more is included in TeamViewer.
Having a son made me question the place of a computer in his life. When should he be allowed to use one? What rules should there be around that use? Would he be better spending his entire life doing “real” stuff?
Being a long weekend I have finished a few books and one of the ones I should have blogged about a while ago is “Doing School”. I brought this book from Amazon after having listened to the author on itunesU. The basic premise of the book is that the author followed five successful students around for a year and reports back on how they got through the academic stresses of that year.
I won’t review it here as there is plenty of reviews on the amazon page linked to below but I found it really made me think about what I wanted for education. That I am not happy to continue to teach like we have done for the past fifty years and that if we always do as we have always done we will always get what we always got, which really is no form of progress.
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.
