In real iLife

Yesterday was fun and got to see a bit how useful iLife apps can be with children.

In the morning I was teaching music with Year 3, where we were doing some preparation for making a radio show all about saving the environment. I had pre-chosen some songs with an eco-theme and then got children listening to some of them to try out work out the environmental message and to decide if they liked them or not. To do this, I got children to search for the songs on the iTunes Music Store and then listen to the 90 second previews you can now get. It would have been more ideal if we had headphones for everyone as it was a little noisy, but that will have to wait until the next financial year.

After school, I had another instalment of iMovie club. We ended up having a go at using the ‘trailers’ feature of iMovie 11, which groups of 3 deciding which film genre they wanted to do, printing off a storyboard and then starting to film their footage using Flipcams. The final product may not make a huge amount of sense, but it’s definitely giving children the experience of sequencing shots together and trying to tell a story. We’ll see next week how good the final product is.

Atomwide Training

Today I had some training at Atomwide‘s headquarters in Orpington, having a reasonably technical look at the range of services they offer, such as USO, Staff Mail, London Mail, WebScreen filtering and remote access. It was really good to see some human faces instead of just interacting with a support site, but also to understand the bigger picture of how everything works. With the demise of any sort of local authority level ICT stuff, it feels like very little is now communicated to schools about what’s going on with LGfL. And because of data-protection, Atomwide can’t just email everyone just because they’ve got all our email addresses, even though I wish they would.

It was a very organised day, with precise start and finish dates, and an individually wrapped and named sandwich at lunchtime, which had been previously ordered on their support site weeks earlier. Atomwide certainly are very thorough in their approach to ICT, with a deep commitment to an audit trail, and it was helpful to talk through issues we had been having.

Some thoughts:

I didn’t know I had to create the aliases for our Staff Mail accounts, so they don’t end in @lgflmail.org but rather @myschool.com. I was wondering why lots of the new staff’s email accounts weren’t working correctly, but now I know it was my fault. Or rather I only found out today that it was my fault.
LGfL 2.0 doesn’t let things like logmein for remote access for security, but the new solutions actually seem quite powerful once you know how. They also offer VNC support, which is good for remotely accessing Macs.
I also didn’t know anything about distribution lists, but do now. Will be playing with that over the next few weeks, as some members of staff have been asking about how to easily send an email to all the teachers.
Despite being warned off AD-Sync by someone from LGfL, it does still seem like an attractive proposal. I’m all for teachers only having to remember one login for everything and so I’m willing to sacrifice some local-level control over our Active Directory.
WebScreen 2.0 is the new web filtering service on LGfL 2.0 and apparently I need to go back at another time for a day’s training on how to use it! But I think I’ve gleaned enough information to be able to make the WWW actually useful when we do the switch.

Hopefully I will now be in a better position to manage the switchover to LGfL 2.0 that is happening this weekend…we’ll see!

“The New iPad”

It’s always fun watching the latest Apple Special Events, even though it’s sad that there’s no Steve Jobs any more. I think I really like Tim Cook, perhaps particularly his calm and slow manner but also cheeky sense of humour.

So, iPad 3.

Or should I say, “The new iPad”. Not sure that would have gotten past Mr Jobs, especially as devices always used to be referred to as if they were a person in the room, i.e. iPad, iPhone rather than the iPad or the iPhone. But I guess they’re doing things a bit differently now.

Thoughts:

Retina display looks amazing. People might complain that it’s just a screen, but the iPad is just screen, so it’s a pretty important part of the equation. It’s pretty funny how it’s got more pixels than a HD TV as well…
Throwaway remark from one of the developers that the new iPad has more processing power/memory etc. than the PS3 or XBOX360. Not bad…
The iPad is starting to be able to do thing much better than a normal ‘PC’ would, i.e. using a finger to paint on touch-up effects in iPhoto.
The iSight camera is nice. But why iSight? Not sure why they dug that name out again, having replaced front-facing cameras with the ‘FaceTime camera’ moniker.

The thing I’m most excited about though is the reduced iPad2 price, especially with an educational discount (and no VAT) added on – the iPad starts to become very, very affordable in schools. Looking forward to finding out the ICT budget in April…

iPad 3…

iPad 3 on Wednesday…exciting!

The expectation seems to be for a retina display and the loss of the home button. Excited about the first, less hopeful about the second!

What I’m particularly hopeful about is the possibility of them still selling the iPad 2 but at a reduced rate – now that would really help with my budget at school! But they probably would cripple it with 8GB of storage…that might just be a bit too limiting. But we shall see.

LGfL Staff Mail on OSX and iOS

WordPress is wonderful because it tells me all kinds of fascinating information, such as what people were searching for when they ended up on this site. And one quite frequent enquiry is regarding LGfL’s Staff Mail settings on a Mac. It’s really easy to set up and here’s how…

You need to be running Snow Leopard (10.6) or higher.
Open up Mail and add an email account. Enter your name and email address etc.
On the next screen, select ‘Exchange 2007’ as the type of server.
Put in mail.lgflmail.org as the server. Then put in your USO username and password.
It’ll ask you about adding contacts and calendar for the account. These can be handy for auto completing addresses of your colleagues
All done!

The settings are pretty similar for iOS. You just need to select ‘Exchange’ as the type of account when adding it in Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars. The domain is lgflmail. Easy!

Do post a comment if my instructions don’t make sense…

LGfL 2.0 attempt 1.0.1

Tomorrow we plan to revert back to our old Synetrix broadband. Now that’s what I call a broadband fail! The only advantage for the Admin network was faster broadband, but the downside was no access to Curriculum shared files and no VPN access from our second site. Not a great trade off if you ask me.

Instead we’re going to wait until the next holidays (April) and attempt it then, merging our Admin and Curriculum networks into one and extending our IP range to accommodate more devices as well. It’s a big job – let’s hope that it works better than the last time.

Sarbanes–Oxley Act and Lion

Ok, take that back.

Apple probably do have to charge for Mountain Lion because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which basically means you can’t add additional functionality to something you’ve already sold. They get around this with iOS devices because Apple account for them over 2 years in a subscription model – you get free updates because Apple treat it as if you’re still paying for it! The Mac isn’t accounted for like this so thus they can’t do free updates.

Rats. Maybe it’ll just be a token cost?

Mountain Lion

So, Mountain Lion is coming this summer. Woo! I personally like how they’re unifying different ideas and sorting out weird inconsistencies between iOS and OSX (like making Notes separate rather than part of Mail, creating a separate Reminders app, and renaming iCal to just Calendar). Messages also is pretty handy, and now available in beta form. The way it was announced was also interesting: no press event, but instead one-to-one presentations with key Apple writers.

My prediction is that it will be a free update to all users of Lion. The benefits of having everyone on the latest OS release far outweigh any revenue they may get from the update. iOS updates are free for this very reason.

LGfL 2.0 attempt 1.0

We had quite an ambitious but not unreasonable plan today of switching over our broadband at school to LGfL 2.0 by the end of the day. We nearly managed it, but with several large stumbling blocks.

We started out tackling our admin network, as they only have 13 computers and a server. This was working quite well until we realised that users could browse the internet but couldn’t access any services from the server (such as shared documents and databases etc.). Not good. This is because LGfL 2.0 does web filtering by requiring each computer to use a given external DNS rather than a local one, or something like 8.8.8.8 from Google. If you set the external DNS first, then you can’t see the server; if you set the internal DNS first, then you can’t see the Internet. Aaarrrghhhh!

After several fraught conversations with Atomwide we eventually got it to work by getting the server’s DNS to forward external requests to the external DNS. We had tried this previously, but we only got it to work by completely rebuilding the DNS.

After doing a second sweep of the Admin computers to check they worked properly, we moved onto the Curriculum network. At first, this seemed pretty straightforward as the old proxy server could be turned off on the PCs with a judicial tweak of the Group Policies and the Macs could be adjusted by pushing out the following commands using Apple Remote Desktop:

networksetup -setwebproxystate Ethernet off
networksetup -setsecurewebproxystate Ethernet off

Bargain. Changing the DNS settings on the server seemed to be a little more straightforward and soon the Internet was up and running successfully.

Sophos on OSX proved a little more tricky to fix, as I couldn’t convince it to change its preferences with Workgroup Manager. Instead I had to log onto each machine and put in the new update URL, which is now as follows:

http://sophos10.lgfl.org.uk/escosx

The next big problem then struck, in that the Internet connection was flaking out. It would sometimes connect, but would then timeout repeatedly. We tracked down the problem to the fact that both the Curriculum and Admin networks were plugged in at the same time (not unreasonable!). We’re still awaiting a fix on this from Atomwide, so in the meantime we’ve switched the Curriculum back to our old provider.

LGfL 2.0 install tomorrow

Tomorrow I’m helping our genius technician do the switchover of our network to LGfL 2.0. I sure know how to spend a half term!

LGfL 2.0 is a London-wide project where they’re switching over broadband from BT cables to Virgin Media instead. This is an epic undertaking, but from our end it just means that they install lots of new routers and firewall boxes and then let us do the physical switch-over when we’re ready. (In a slightly ironic twist, Virgin Media don’t actually have any fibre-optic cables in our area so we had to use BT’s anyway.) We did a little test a few weeks ago and the speeds are about 4x faster – yay!

The main difference with the setup at school is that there no longer is a proxy server for web filtering but instead Virgin Media’s DNS server blocks or lets sites through. We’ve got our own internal DNS server so hopefully we’ll just have to change the settings on that rather than for every machine. I’m also hoping that a Apple Remote Desktop UNIX command to all the Macs should be enough to turn off the proxy server settings. But we shall see!