LearnShifting

Before I start on this post I want to reflect for a moment on the date. Ten years ago I was driving to work after having arrived in Melbourne on one of the last Ansett flights from Darwin. Helen was at home, 6 months pregnant with Joe resting after the trip. I turned on the car radio and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I rang Helen and told her to turn on the TV and she too couldn’t believe it. It was a terrible day and one that truly changed the world. May we all one day be able to reconcile.

From the horror of that event, let’s move to something nicer and closer to family. In the last ten years we have seen the demise of film in cameras and the matching increase in the use of digital cameras. I take a lot of photographs and although I don’t count them, I think I have about 40,000 or more photographs stored on a 1 terabyte hard drive which is backed up weekly using the Windows backup software that comes with Windows 7.0.

This article is long - the moral is short - back your cherised memories and check that the backup actually works.

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This entry was posted on September 11, 2011 at 11:16 AM and has received 214 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Three things rolled up into one blog entry...

• IE 9.0 Release Candidate available
• Finding out how fast your connection is and what ports are being used
• Partners in Learning links to applications and solutions

This is a bit of a Microsoft Entry. I meant to write about this on Friday and things go out of control. Firstly I downloaded and installed the Internet Explorer Release Candidate 9.0. It is quite good and now we have a complete set of browsers that support the <video> tag and most of HTML5.

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This entry was posted on February 14, 2011 at 1:31 PM and has received 506 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

There are quite a few situations where we want to engage people in an online social environment to create, sort, edit, share and if required to delete information. The popularity of Facebook and YouTube are evidence that people do engage with this approach. I'd like to use this entry to expand on the journey I have taken with two real uses of this technology and how it can benefit you as an educator, a parent, a club member or someone who needs a combined soapbox and filing cabinet out there in cyberspace - where it appears that now - everybody can hear you scream.

This article talks about about Microsoft's Office Live Workspaces which look uncannily like SharePoint and links to other tools that allow us to communicate and share information.

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This entry was posted on April 8, 2010 at 6:43 AM and has received 336 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We have a number of exceptional learning assets from the Australian Children Television Foundation. These are distributed on DVD and are in a variety of formats. The most common formats are Adobe PDF, DVD Movie, executable flash, FLV (Flash Video) and some html documents.

The challenge is to convert where required and upload the content into our network in a way that teachers can access and use within our network, but the resources cannot be copied or reused outside of the scope of our license.

The content of the DVDs should be in a format that a teacher in a remote or urban location can play the video on an electronic whiteboard or projector to the class and if a student misses out because they were absent, they can login from school or home to review the content at their convenience.

How did we do it?

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This entry was posted on January 25, 2010 at 11:54 AM and has received 323 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We like SharePoint (although we do have our bad days with it) and we like podcasting/vodcasting/blogs. We have established blogs in SharePoint and I have mentioned how impressed I was with the integration of MS Word as the editor and the ease of publishing content to a SharePoint blog.

We had discussed integrating the beta version of the SharePoint Podcasting Kit into our schools environment and although we really want to do it, we needed to make sure that whereever these files are stored we have indexed them, provided enough computer power to deliver them and ensured they have both the quality and clearance for delivery via our networks. This blog entry is a revisitation of this request and options available.

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This entry was posted on December 29, 2009 at 2:46 PM and has received 1204 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

 long time ago when the internet was young and file download speeds were measured in the tens of bytes per second rather than close to a meg per second we enjoy on both moodles, there was always a problem of trying to download a file (normally less than 300k or one photograph) as the connection would time out... along came some smart people and wrote a program that keeps on downloading, retrying and relinking bits of files into one download even when a time out occurs... Luckily like winzip and a bunch of other neat tools, they are still around and I have just used it to download a large 250 meg file that previously failed on the atclass instance of moodle...

This entry was posted on December 10, 2009 at 8:59 AM and has received 290 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.