Friday, November 25th, 2005
I discovered Stellarium recently and suggest anyone teaching science add it to their toolbelt. From the project FAQ:
Stellarium is an open source desktop planetarium for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. It renders the skies in realtime using OpenGL, which means the skies will look exactly like what you see with your ...
Posted in Curriculum Resources, Open source | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 17th, 2005
There is a bunch of open source software available for Apple's OS X operating system. Thanks to Open Source Mac it's now a lot easier to find. Many of the apps have obvious educational uses and other are just for fun. The list is growing so bookmark it and check ...
Posted in Open source | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 8th, 2005
Moodle is the biggest open source course management system in the world. It competes head-to-head with Blackboard on features and crushes the commercial competition on price. I've posted about the use of Moodle in my school district in the past, and anyone who's read any of those posts knows that ...
Posted in Online learning, Savvy Technologist Podcast | 14 Comments »
Sunday, October 30th, 2005
In the ten days or so since my first post on the subject I've read and now re-read most of David Allen's Getting Things Done. I've spent hours at this point clearing my desk of clutter and my brain of all of the things tasks and projects I've been trying ...
Posted in Personal productivity | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
I got to facilitate a roundtable discussion on accessible Web design today. The lack of an Internet connection in the room prevented us from showing some live sites, but I promised to post some links here. I showed a bit of my presentation on the topic from last year's TIES ...
Posted in Accessibility and assistive tech, Conferences | Comments Off
Tuesday, September 20th, 2005
Opera announced today that their browser is now free (but not open source). This would be just another browser option if Opera weren't so good. It's always been the fastest browser out there and their support of a "presentation mode" makes it an outstanding choice for presentations. With Opera Show ...
Posted in Web technology | 1 Comment »
Monday, July 25th, 2005
Blogging and podcasting has been the single most important part of my personal professional development over the last two years. Now that Apple has built blogging into OS X Server and has made creating blogs for users as easy as clicking a checkbox, my goal of getting blogs going at ...
Posted in Podcasting and iPod | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005
I had the pleasure of meeting an old long-distance colleague of mine, Jeff Elkner, face to face for the first time today. Jeff and I collaborated a bit several years ago when we were both teaching the Python programming language in our respective high schools. I used the How To ...
Posted in Savvy Technologist Podcast | Comments Off
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005
I'm hanging out in the open source pavilion watching Tom Hoffman do a demonstration of the new SchoolTool open source school management system. SchoolTool is a product being development by the Shuttleworth Foundation and Tom is the project manager.
We're looking at the calendaring features which allow students to create and ...
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, May 25th, 2005
Terri Osland, my colleague at Hopkins High School, discovered a handy application that will find a place on our one-to-one laptops next fall. ImageWell is a tiny little program, but it has a bunch of handy features:
Drag images in and out of the well, resize, crop, shape, rotate and add ...
Posted in One-to-one Computing, Tips and Tricks | Comments Off
Friday, May 20th, 2005
Do you need a content management system (CMS) for your school or district Web site? Absolutely. In a world where Plone, Drupal, Mambo, and many other free and open source solutions exist, you would need to convince me that you shouldn't use a CMS. It's clear to me that individually ...
Posted in IT Infrastructure, Web technology | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005
Over the past year our district's tech support department has come to rely on our ticketing system more and more. We use Request Tracker, a free and open source, Web-based tech support product that has Web and email interfaces. What began as an experiment has become an integral part of ...
Posted in IT Infrastructure, Open source | Comments Off
