Today at the CODE Summit we started with one of the most entertaining speakers I have ever heard. Sir Ken Robinson was humorous almost to the point of being ridiculous until he brought his humour around to highlight something extremely profound. My favourite analogy was comparing a childs gift, i.e. a human resource to a natural resource…it’s not always lying there on the surface, sometimes you have to dig for it. He also referenced a BBC program with the very telling title of “Does he take sugar” which refers to the extremely rude habit people have of asking questions of the person pushing the wheelchair instead of the person in the wheelchair. Sir Ken, who contracted Polio at the age of 5, talked about how his parents and teachers helped him find his gifts and talents and encouraged all of us to do the same.

On the heels of Sir Ken was a presentation from the Hasting Prince Edward DSB on Assistive Technology. Some of the software titles they used for their CODE project were Kurzweil, Dragon and Co-Writer. The question was asked “What structures can be put in place to eradicate the perceived stigma of using assistive software and the notion that the use of assistive software is equivalent to cheating.” I wish I had gone to this session later as I picked up a great line at the next session – “Equity is equal outcomes” meaning that it may take some assistive technology to get everyone to the finish line and that is OK! The team from Hastings put together some great resources for teaching kids how to use these programs and I hope they will be made available on the CODE website. The team also cited a big influence from Todd Cunningham

The last session was on Differentiated Instruction and was presented by a team from the Hamilton Wentworth DSB. The team from HWDSB really took the DI torch and ran with it. My group discussed the “Book Club” and “Dinner and a Movie” projects which were very clever ways of engaging their teachers in professional discussions around DI books and research. It was evident the team was walking the talk as they rolled out coloured folders, varied activities, small group discussions, clickers, clappers, candies and chocolate. We had a great discussion and shared our own board’s activities and practice around book study which seemed to be well received by the group.

Last but not least, I have to give kudos to the conference planning committee for trying out twitter. I was a little disappointed in the small number of posts but making that the only forum for feedback on the conference was a great way to tell the senior administration that made up the bulk of the conference attendees that web 2.0 is here to stay so hop on board!

Some other conference related links:

Parent Engagement
and don’t miss the CODE Chronicles

I am currently at the CODE Summit, a conference for school boards that participated in the Special Education projects funded by the Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE). At my board our CODE projects were “Differentiatied Education and Leadership – Deal or No Deal” and “Reaching Exceptionalities in Academics through a Community of Hope – REACCH”. School boards are now presenting the results of their CODE projects and they are ASTOUNDING! I listened to a presentation from the Nipissing Parry Sound Catholic board and they increased some of their provincial standardized results by over 30%—that is incredible! The team from NPSC used Alphasmarts, Smartboards and later a laptop cart in the project classroom as well as Co-Writer and Write Out Loud. The stories around individual students were heart warming and moving.

A theme that kept coming up, and the headline of one of their slides was “Independent students allow for focused teaching.” Their model was to use technology to make students independent in their writing process thereby freeing up the teacher for one on one and small group interactions. They confirmed that the upfront work in teaching the kids how to use the technology was worth it in the latter part of the year when the teacher could have more meaningful interactions with her students. Their results certainly confirm their approach works!

File this under “How did my job bring me here.” While evaluating a wireless LAN solution for the school board we shortlisted two vendors, one selling Aruba, one selling Meru (More on this in a later post). Little did I know that the Air Canada Centre had recently switched from a Cisco based solution to an Aruba system to support laptop and POS devices. So there I am, standing in the lobby of the Air Canada Centre on a “site visit”. Talking with the IT staff of the ACC in the lower bowl the topic of placement of AP’s comes up, especially above/below ceiling placement. As our installs will likely be above ceiling we asked if there were any locations with a similar placement. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the locker rooms are the only locations where the AP’s are hidden. Now I don’t know what information we expected to glean from standing in the Leafs and Raptors dressing rooms looking at the ceiling where the access points were hidden but it sure was a cool feeling being in there! The best part IMHO was seeing the Raptors video editing suite where they slice, dice and tag each game so that the team staff and players can instantly bring up video clips of any player or play…cool.

Sometimes this blog is just a place for me to write down something I don’t want to forget. For the last six years PVNC has used a simple evergreen policy…take the number of computers you have in production and divide it by the length of time you want to keep them to give you your annual refresh. Simple, right? Well, we have a couple bumps…the first year we refreshed in this way, 2002, we had some extra money and bought 1000 machines, 400 more than our usual refresh level, leaving a few “dips” later in our refresh plan. We have also opened a number of schools where we put in all new computers in one building (meaning they are all aging at the same rate).

If I had a time machine, I would go back and purchase a mix of new and refurbished computers to keep the refresh balanced and also ensure that we don’t have an entire school filled with six year old computers down the road. If I take those 1000 machines from 2002 as an example, if I had purchased ~300 refurbs, it would normalize future replacement and protect us from a spike in repairs due to a large number of machines getting very old at the same time. I ran into this problem at a Secondary School last year, we opened the school in 2001 with 100 computers. In 2007 they had added some computers but the bulk of their machines were 6 years old which heavily impacted computer based courses in those schools. If I had bought half refurbs, I could have replaced those refurbs with new machines in 2005.

To sum up, for a big purchase, I want to remember to consider including a one time purchase of refurbished computers to offset future replacement.

It was way past my bedtime but I actually stayed up to watch the Sarah Palin speech at the Republican National Convention. After hearing so much on the news, and some derision from “The Voice” on CBC’s The Current, I decided I would have a listen to what Governor Palin had to say.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed…not by what she said even though it definitely doesn’t match well with my political leanings…but how she said it. Not much enthusiasm, right off the teleprompter, obviously told to stay on message, or else.

But, that’s not why I am writing.

When the party was polling each state for their nomination, Arizona passed. I didn’t think much of it. Then, just shy of the almost 1200 votes required for nomination, all the states started to pass. Then I thought, what the hell is going on. Let us ask professor google. And then I discovered the Achilles heel of the Republican party and why Obama has been so successful with younger demos.

On the Republican National Convention website there was a blog…I thought to myself, “Surely someone on the floor will explain to this dumb Canadian why all these states are suddenly passing on their vote.” The only problem is, the last post on the blog was three days ago. Now I don’t want to cast stones because I am certainly not so speedy with the blog updates but really…three days ago?!? So then I head over to the DNC website. The last day of the convention saw 7 posts, 6 of which were video updates posted to You-tube. No doubt there were also micro updates to cell phones on Twitter and a DNC facebook group. The blog has a Tag cloud! Obama gets it. That’s why he has more money than he could possibly spend. He is tapping into the long tail…small payments from millions of people. And when it comes to getting out the vote, you can bet the SMS and emails will be flying. How will McCain get the young voter out?

Oh, and by the way, McCain is from Arizona. By tradition that state gets to cast the votes that nominate him. But, if they had kept their blog updated I could have gone to bed an hour earlier.

I was researching wireless for a WLAN implementation RFP going out and stumbled on this website, wikia.com. It seems to be a new take on Wiki where they are grouped into communities, one of which is school computing. It looks like a great resource but I haven’t had a chance to do a deeper dive.

I have been trying to install Wine on EeePc for a while..the most popular instruction, to use the Xandros repos at wine.budgetdedicated.com don’t work. They throw an error about a Winbind dependency. So I am reading a forum post that describes this problem perfectly and I wanted to share the reply:

_this is not a wine bug

nor is the repo for xandros

but rather for ubuntu and debian.

either build wine from source a get a package for your Distribution. _

Super helpful.

If Linux is going to win converts, the user base has to realize that the vast majority of computer users don’t compile the software they use. In fact, most mainstream computers don’t ship with the tools necessary to compile from from source.

Maybe some Linux users believe this is a must have skill for anyone that is going to use Linux. If that is the case, hope you are enjoying life on the sidelines because that is where you will stay.

Well, it took me a while but I did validate the instructions I found for a factory eeePC restore from USB. The instructions are almost perfect except I had better success copying the boot tool folder to my Windows XP hard drive and running from there with the Recovery CD in the ODD. So, my version of the instructions, without the pretty screenshots, would be:

Easy Eee PC recovery in ten quick steps

(Assumes E: is your DVD Drive)

1. Insert the Tools DVD into your computers DVD drive and copy the E:SoftwareBootToolBootTool folder to your hard drive.

2. Remove the Tools DVD and insert the Recovery DVD and your USB Key. Navigate to the BootTool folder on your hard drive and run FreeOSTool.exe

3.Once the utility is started, please ensure the disk drive chosen is correct and select “Copy EEE PC 700701 image to USB flash and make it bootable”

Once complete, press execute.

4. The warning message will pop up to make sure you have backed up your data (if any) from your USB drive. Press Yes if confirmed.

5. Next, wait for a minute before formatting finishes. During formatting, a message pops up to ask you to unplug and plug the USB drive back and click Retry.

6. Wait for a while before the files are copied to the USB drive. Once completed, a message shows up and you may click Yes to close the program.

You may then unplug the USB drive.

7. Plug the USB Drive into your Eee PC and boot up. When the Eee PC logo appears, click the Esc key couple of time to go into the boot device menu. Please select the USB Drive and press Enter.(Note: Due to the manufacture may vary, the name of the USB drive may be different. However, they should show “USB:…” to begin with)

8. Please wait a few minute before the recovery system is activated.

9. Next, it will ask again if one wishes to recover. Input “yes” and then Enter to continue.

10. After a few minutes, the process will finish and one may click Enter to reboot the system. Once rebooted, the recovery is completed.

As I was searching for a way to speed up my video encoding I stumbled on this article. I couldn’t agree more. Even if Moore’s law holds true, it will be 10 years before a home PC will encode video to DVD at an acceptable speed. With video editing becoming a more mainstream activity there needs to be an easy way to aggregate the processing power of the 3-4 computers in some of our households. There is a Java X-Grid client which allowed me to connect 3 machines to my Mac for a total of 12 Ghz of processing power but I can’t run my encoding client on an X-Grid of mixed platform. I wonder how schools with active video production facilities are dealing with this…maybe a video encoding grid at Secondary would help these students be more productive and address one of the least appealing aspects of digital video production.

If you are one of the two people reading my blog (Thanks Mom and Dad!) you know that I wrote a few entries on email overload which were then published in the OASBO Advocate. Well…I just finished reading Wired and Clive Thompson had a great article on, you guessed it, email overload. While I didn’t take the time to patent it, the phrase “timesuck” figures prominently in his article, i.e. THE TITLE, “Great American Timesuck”! Clive’s article is here

Coincidence? Or just wishful thinking that maybe there are three readers of my blog!

Either way, the article features a cool little piece of software that I definitely intend to try, Xobni

It is billed as AI for your inbox and gives you some insight into how you AND the people you correspond with use their email. Neat.