Category Archives: One-to-one Computing

Information about the Hopkins School District one-to-one computing pilot project

Easy Web page creation with Nvu

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I just discovered Nvu and I think we’ll include it on the student laptops in our one-to-one computing project next fall. Nvu is the latest incarnation of the old Netscape/Mozilla Composer which, like the Firefox browser, has been split out of Mozilla into a standalone application.

Most of the people who use graphical tools to create Web pages in our schools use Dreamweaver, but there’s no way I want to buy that for each of the 650 laptops. Nvu might be just the ticket for students who want to learn to create Web pages. The tool promotes CSS and other Web design best practices and seems to go well beyond basic Web development. Maybe they’ll all be blogging someday, but until then Nvu will have to do.

Comics for learning

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The success of Frank Miller’s Sin City in theaters has brought the comic book genre into the spotlight. As a former Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Daredevil fan I was quite intrigued when I heard about Comic Life on the MAKE:DIYcast podcast this morning. Comic Life is a Mac OS X application that takes photos from iPhoto and lets you drag and drop your way to a comic book. Check out the Comic Life gallery for some examples.

This software has such amazing potential with kids. Can you imagine how geared up students would be to use this? Heck, I had a blast creating my first comic. (I created it very quickly. Please forgive the rampant silliness.) Who wouldn’t be motivated to do a writing project this way? Given that iPhoto can be used to manage any kind of image and not just digital photos, my brain is racing to think of uses for this software. Here’s the first off-the-top-of-the-head list:

  • Science students create lab reports combining digital photos of an experiment with hand drawn or computer generated graphics explaining what’s going on. They could include their data analysis right in the “comic.”
  • History students find some period costumes and re-enact a historically significant event.
  • Students use Comic Life to create a storyboard of a video project including some sample dialog and key visual elements.
  • Combine digital images and hand-drawn graphics in the same panel to send characters back in time or create giant ladybugs that can crush cars.
  • Students create a comic book that explains their family history and combines old and new photos.

This software would be a great addition to the student laptops in our one-to-one computing project. The cost is very reasonable (especially for site licenses) and the potential is huge. This is easily the most fun I’ve had with a piece of software in a long time. If you’re reading this and think of a good project idea, post it in the comments. Let’s see if we can get a good list going.

Software review: iFlash 2.5

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As much as we’d all like our students to spend all of their time doing hard-core constructivist school work, the fact remains that a lot of the learning we ask kids to do is not much more than memorization. So until cranial expansion slots are commonplace there will be a place for software like iFlash.

iFlash is a Mac OS X application for creating and sharing sets of flash cards. Their Web site has a good description:

iFlash includes many great features to help you study. You can record audio directly into any flash-card (great for foreign languages), as well as attach images. Other features include an unlimited amount of card sides per deck, advanced importing and exporting, iPod support, quick-searching, and a beautiful interface that is strikingly similar to other iApplications (like iTunes and iPhoto).

As cool as it is to have flash cards that can include images, audio, and multiple sides per card, I love the fact that teachers can create sets of cards to share with their students and students can share cards with one another. (Practicing on your iPod is pretty cool too.) I’ve purchased a district license for this software and it will be included on the laptops in our one-to-one computing project next year.

Hopkins one-to-one project Web site

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I’m way behind posting about our Hopkins One-to-one Computing Initiative. I’ve got some more things to share, but I’ll just point to the project Web site for now. One thing to notice is that I decided to use a WordPress blog to host the site, specifically the alpha version that supports static Web pages within the blog site. You can see those static pages in the set of “Pages” links on the right side. It’s a handy feature to be able to add a few static pages and have them managed with the built-in content management system.

Let the imaging begin

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Room full of iBooks ready for imaging

What a day! We had a bunch of people including two Apple system engineers at various times unpacking laptops and getting them ready to image. Hopefully you can get a sense of the setup from the picture. We will image about 50 laptops at a time starting first thing tomorrow morning. Assuming things go well, we should be able to do get almost halfway through the 650 machines. I’ll provide a little more info about the imaging recipe in a future post.

Update: No, the iMac in the picture is not the machine that is hosting the images for the iBooks. Just out of view sit a dual G5 PowerMac and a dual G5 Xserve that are doing the heavy lifting. The iMac is good for streaming iTunes, however.

A room full of iBooks

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A room full of iBooks

Less than a week after placing the order, an incredulous delivery guy showed up with a truck full of 650 Apple iBook laptops. We had a pretty good idea where we were going to store them, but weren’t entirely sure how much room it would take. The stack you see in the picture (click for a larger view) accounts for almost 600 of them.

We hired the technician who will be responsible for doing the inventory and installing the images on those machines. He didn’t run screaming from the room when he saw them so I’m optimistic that he’ll work out.

The laptops are coming

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I placed the single largest order of my career today. Within hours of Apple announcing the new and improved iBooks we placed a nearly $670,000 order for 650 of them. Now we need to find a place to store them while we get them inventoried and imaged. Pretty exciting. Our second training session is coming up next week and I’m really fired up to get back together with these teachers and do some intense curriculum and technology work.

I’ve decided to use a blog as the main Web page for the project. I thought it would offer an ideal way to engage some of the one-to-one participants in telling their stories. If all goes as planned we’ll have some really interesting stories to tell.

Going wireless

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By the end of next week all seven of our elementary schools will be completely wireless campuses. This project is part of our district one-to-one computing pilot project that I mentioned previously. Creating a wireless campus presents all sorts of opportunities and challenges. Ubiquitous access to the network (in conjunction with the 1:1 pilot that will provide the wireless-enabled laptops) is certainly the most important part. I’ve been asking this question a lot lately: How will a classroom operate differently when a teacher can say “open your laptops” as easily as “open your textbooks”? I think I’m going to write a bit about that in the coming months.

What else needs to be considered in a wireless environment? Security is an obvious factor. How do we balance resource accessibility and security? How do we properly supervise students when they may be using the network or internet in a much less supervised environment such as the lunch room or the far end of a hallway? Lots of questions to be answered here. Stay tuned.