Category: Hello world!

iChatting across subnets

We’ve had iChat set up on our macs for a while, making use of Bonjour to provide a zero- configuration way for teachers to communicate around the school. We now have a second site and teachers wanted to be able to iChat between sites but it wasn’t working as Bonjour doesn’t easily work across two different subnets (especially if LGfL are involved!). So instead I set up iChat Sever on our Lion Server.

It was mainly straightforward, once I had figured out how…

  1. Turn on iChat server on the Lion server.  Involves switching it to on.  It sets up a Jabber messaging server.
  2. Set up the login details using Workgroup Manager.  There is a manifest called ‘iChat.Jabber’ which gives you a managed client settings already set up.
  3. When a user logs onto the Mac, their credentials are used to log onto the iChat server.  This requires an AD or OD setup, which meant a few issues when it came to the experimental ditched directory Macs. I had to set these machines up manually using the user’s network logins.
  4. Initially, the iChat window doesn’t show any ‘buddies’, which  renders the service useless at school because teachers wouldn’t know each other’s iChat accounts.  Lion server promises the ability to add all users as buddies automatically, but this only seems to work if you’ve got an Open Directory setup (i.e. all user accounts are on the Mac server rather than elsewhere).  Instead I had to log each user into iChat and then run the command ‘sudo jabber_autobuddy -m’ in Terminal on the Lion server.  This adds everyone who has ever logged into the iChat server onto everyone’s buddy list.

It seems to be working fine, with the teachers across two sites particularly finding it helpful.

Erasing SMART Ink

One of the features of Smart Notebook 11, the latest version of the software used to run Smartboards, is a featured called ‘SMART Ink’.  It’s an evolution of the previous functionality that allowed you to write on any window using the Smartboard pens. Previous versions just put a big picture frame over to allow you to write, which was great for full-screen applications but not so good for windows that move around.  To get around this problem, SMART released SMART Ink, which ties the writing to a specific window, which can then be moved around the screen.  Which is all great in theory.

However, in practice it results in lots of ugly green boxes sitting in the title bar of every single window you have open, and even every little dialogue box as well.  And then when you move the window around, it doesn’t gracefully move with it but rather jitters around, destroying all the hard work Apple engineers have done in giving silky-smooth-graphic-card-accelerated windowing.

But not only that, it also seems to generally slow the Mac down, as acknowledged here and here by SMART. Not very smart.

Several people have suggested ways to remove the software, which I have roughly followed.  It basically involves removing the ‘SMART Ink’ login item from System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items and then killing the process using Activity Monitor.  It’s a bit of a faff to go computer to computer, but seems to have had a good impact on speed.

Apple Education Event

Today I was at an Apple Education Event, organised by Toucan at the Apple European Briefing Centre above the Regent Street Apple Store. The venue is a bit like a private Apple Store, with all the various Apple products laid out on wooden benches in the refreshments area, and then a mid-sized meeting room with big screens and swivel chairs. Very swish!

The day was composed of an opening Apple Spiel (pretty much exactly the same as the other Apple Events I’ve been to, ie. how mobile technology is changing the face of education and how Apple stuff is supremely place to capitalise this) and then various speakers from schools who’ve used iPads. One stand-out feature from the opening ‘on-message’ part was the power of iTunes U. Schools, and even just individual teachers, can create private courses and manage all the content that students access. The iPad in a sense becomes a VLE (virtual learning environment), offering something far richer and more useful than the horror that is Fronter. I hope to look into this very soon, particularly as a way to get the Y5&6 teachers using their iPads.

The rest of the presentations seem like a bit of a blur now, but here are some of the highlights which stand out:

  • Other methods can work, but it seems that a one-to-one deployment of iPads is the best and most productive way. I’d really like to see somewhere where this is happening and grill them over the details. It’s not something that is ruled out for our school, but the case has got to be strong.
  • Cedars School of Excellence (home of Fraser Speirs and the first ever 1:1 iPad deployment in the world) got a mention, including a natty little video explaining what they’d done. All the kid’s iPads weren’t in cases though – apparently Apple asked for them to be removed in the video!
  • Meraki got a mention as a way of managing loads of iPads. I really want to look into this, as it is apparently free! The mention was from a large international school, in the process of deploying 600 or so iPads, so it can’t be that bad.
  • There were lots of different apps demonstrated, some with more success than others. It seems that the recommendation is to find the ‘core’ apps for your school and really use them effectively, rather than buying gazillions of apps. Interestingly, content creation apps really are the key ones (ie. iLife and iWork titles plus things like Comic Life or Book Creator).
  • DIY charge and sync solutions also got a mention. It was nice to hear someone also balking at the thought of spending £1000 to sync and charge 16 iPads when a more homespun solution works pretty much as well.
  • The newly announced VPP programme (Volume Purchase Programme) was talked about a few times too. I’m glad it’s here but probably won’t be using it until June 2013 when further iPads are deployed.

I guess I’ve come away feeling a little overwhelmed at the enormity of the task of getting these iPads to really work in a school, but also the huge potential they hold in transforming children’s learning. I hope that we get it right!

Thoughts on iPad

Now that the first full week of school has finished, here are some observations on how the iPad experiment is going.

  • Reception children love the iPads! Each class only got 3 each, but already the teachers are asking when we’re getting some more. The GripCase cases also seem to be doing the job, protecting the iPads but also giving handy handles for the kids to grasp.
  • The upper KS2 iPads seem to be getting some use, although only for some Internet research at the moment. But I’ve been told that teachers have planned in more iPad activities for next week, so I’m excited about that.
  • iFiles + WebDAV = joy! One of the features of iFiles is that you can easily browse the files on a WebDAV share, which is what we’ve done with our shared ‘school’ drive. I think it might need a step-by-step guide for the teachers though.
  • One of the Assistant Heads wanted to showcase some of the children’s maths learning in an assembly and asked me how it could be done using an iPad mirrored onto the hall’s big screen. I found the Educreations app, which lets you type, write and manipulate objects on a blank ‘whiteboard’ area. Apparently it went down a treat!
  • We had to do an ICT audit today to make sure all the new equipment had been included in our inventory, and using an iPad to assist us was invaluable. We did use a paper copy to highlight off what was there, but used a copy of the spreadsheet in Numbers to search for serial numbers for items that had moved or we could t find. An enormous time-saver!

I’m sure there will be more, but I’m really pleased with how iPads are already being used across the school.

First day back…

I went back to school today to try and get ready for the beginning of term.  As always, there’s lots of jobs that come up along the way, but here are a few things I managed to accomplish today:

  • Apply for some ‘up-to-date’ Mountain Lion licences for some Mac Minis that we bought after Mountain Lion was finally announced.  I had to go into school to get some serial numbers and to get invoices from our reseller, but it was pretty straightforward. Today’s the last day that you can apply so I was cutting it a bit fine.
  • Set up a repository for Munki on our Mac Mini server.  We’ve been using Munki with much success just as a way to automatically install Apple’s software updates when the computer is logged out. It’s pretty handy!  However, I’ve been wanting to use it update other software (such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Flash Player), rather than having to push out packages using Apple Remote Desktop.  I followed a really clear guide on the Munki website, which took a bit of time to get my head around but seems to have worked fine.

Bicycle for the mind

Just been watching a lost interview from Steve Jobs in 1990 where he clearly gives his ‘bicycle for the mind’ quote about computers.  It’s at around 3:00 of the video.  I’ve tried looking for the exact quote before, but couldn’t find it anywhere accurately.

Well, here it is…

“So for me, a computer has always been a bicycle for the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.” (Steve Jobs)

Macs and Antivirus

Yesterday I noticed that the top free app on the Mac App Store was a piece of antivirus software. Very depressing.

Why is it depressing? Now I know there have been a few virus scares on the Mac recently, but on the whole OSX is much more secure than Windows. The problem with antivirus software is that it slows down a computer as it continually checks files and processes for errant behaviour. I’ve noticed that some of the Macs at school run quite slowly compared with my own MacBook Air, particularly with startup times. I suspect that the wonderful SMART software and drivers might be something to do with it, but probably Sophos antivirus is too. I’m under the impression that using Sophos is required by LGfL, but maybe it’s not. And it’s not as if all the iPads can run Sophos either…

…so maybe I’ll try removing Sophos and see what happens then. Am I being foolish and crazy?

Legacy and Education

One thing I like about Apple is that they are happy to jettison the past in order to make way for the future.  The opposite can be said for educational ICT, which doggedly clings to legacy technology.  T.  The thing that depresses me about using Macs in schools is that the software teachers use all day long is Microsoft Office, a bloated and ageing necessary evil that was originally released on the Macintosh in 1989.  Or that we’re still using SMARTBoards that require a USB-serial connector.  And that we’re having to run a Windows virtual machine in order to support PC-only software that was released circa 2003.

What I’m looking forward to about starting to use iPads in September is that legacy is excluded.  You can’t keep doing things the old way but instead have to embrace the new.  Instead of Word, Pages.  Instead of SMARTBoards, video mirroring to your screen of choice.  Instead of Windows-only handwriting software, all manner of interactive letter-forming apps.  Well that’s the dream anyway.