The Lightspeed Security Agent is fully deployed throughout the network. The last thing left to do is the SAAVEx agent on the Exchange server. This step is proving a little more difficult than the rest. Every time I install it, the SMTP and IIS servers keep crashing. I have put a call into technical support, and as always, they returned my call very promptly. However, because of a blizzard and a personal day I have yet to get back to them to work on the issue.

The deployment of the standard Security Agent went very smoothly, and it is now fully deployed throughout our network. The information these agents are providing us is proving very enlightening. I think the Suspicious Search Engine Queries is my favorite piece. It has led to some interesting conversations with some students and to some suspension of Internet privileges for a few students.

Overall Lightspeed Total Traffic Control has been a very big success. The more I use it, the more I learn it, and the more useful it becomes. I am extremely happy with the district's purchase of this product.

        

THe new school year brought some new technology to Okoboji Community School DIstrict in the InterWrite SchoolPad 400. I am one to extensively demo every product before making a purchase when possible. In this case I demoed 5 different units before deciding on this particular model. I also like to have beta groups test any new technology in the classrooms before we make any large purchases of that technology. So, this year 12 teachers at Okoboji will be test driving the SchoolPad 400s in their classrooms.

First impressions are great. One of the teachers that is testing the units happens to be my wife who teaches 7th grade language arts. She is loving it. I am really hoping her enthusiasm toward the product spreads to the others, because she is coming up with new ways to use it daily. Also, I feel that the SchooPad 400s have the ability to make an impact on student engagement in the classrooms for a fraction of the price of a full-on interactive whiteboard. As always, I will keep you posted on future developments with this project.

        

It has been a while since my last post. If anyone reading this is an IT person in a school district you will understand why. With the end of summer and the start of a new school year, things get extremely hectic. With the start to the school year this year came the purchase of Lightspeed TTC for Okoboji Community School District. 

I am learning it as I go and will take the included training session as soon as possible, but until then first impressions are great. It was a little overwhelming at first just because it can do so much. However, it was not long before I was finding my way around the interface and quickly becoming used to the very logical locations of things. As I use it more and more it is becoming very easy to work with compared to our previous solution.

I have yet to deploy the Security Agent beyond some test machines, but that has also proven easily configurable. Once I get a little time to learn that as well, it will be deployed. I want the end-user experience of the Security Agent to be very minimal if not non-existent. I will do my best to keep you posted as to the progress on this project.

        

It has been a while since my last post. I have been swamped with trying to get things ready for the upcoming school year. Plus, it is summer in Okoboji.

Anyway, I thought I should post this little tid bit regarding randomizing logos in Plone 3.2.3. It does not work the way it used to in this original post from Plone 2.x. However, you can use the script from step 2 of that post and edit the logo.pt file to get it to work. So follow step 2 of that post and then edit the logo.pt file from the ZMI inside your Plone instance under /portal_view_customizations/plone.logo to call that script instead of the img tag that is there. Below is what my edited version looks like.

<a metal:define-macro="portal_logo"
   id="portal-logo"
   accesskey="1"
   tal:attributes="href view/navigation_root_url"
   i18n:domain="plone">
   <img tal:attributes="src context/logo" />
</a>

I also wanted my logos to show different sets of logos depending on what section of the website the user is in (i.e. when in the middle school section the user sees middle school related logos). So, I added a logo folder to each section of the website containing the appropriate number of logos to satisfy the script (in my case 15 for each section). Zope/Plone looks for the closest instance of the resource (i.e. the logo folder) based on where the script is called from. It's nice like that.

If you just want one folder with logos for your entire site you would just put one logo folder in the main folder of your Plone instance.

I hope this can help someone save some time searching. I would like to thank the original poster, Paul Hartzog, and pigeonflight from IRC #Plone for their know how.

        

Okoboji Community Schools has decided to get 100 netbooks for the upcoming school year. 1 cart of 24 will be put in the elementary building to replace an existing cart and 3 carts of 24 will be put in the middle school to replace 1 cart as part of our refresh plan. In anticipation of this purchase we have demoed 4 different models.

The 4 we demoed were the MSI Wind, Acer Aspire One, HP 2140, and the Asus Eee PC 1000HE. We gave each demo machine to high school students to try out and give us feedback on. In addition to this testing I thouroughly tested each model myself to make sure it could do what we are going to expect them to do. Although the high school students are not yet the intended audience, we fealt that their input would be better for demoing purposes.

The student favorite was the HP 2140. The main reason for this student opinion was the larger keyboard size. However, the keys themselves are smooth and slippery and also a wierd concave design. They did not really like the buttons on either side of the mouse pad instead of the traditional below-the-mouse-pad position. I was also not a fan of the mouse button position at first, but got used to it pretty quickly. If it were not for the cost of the HP 2140 we would have gone with this machine. All of the other models were cheaper.

MSI's Wind was the first demo we had and was enjoyed by the student testers (the novelty factor was interesting to see.) They did not like the keyboard or the mouse pad and mouse button(s). I too was unimpressed with its keyboard and mouse pad resposiveness. The mouse button(s) were a single button that toggled in the middle which I also did not like.

I was excited when I first received the Acer Aspire One.  First of all, it had a great price. It had great battery life. The keyboard was small but not too uncomfotably so. The students agreed that is was better than the MSI Wind. They, also, did not like the smallness of the keyboard. The keyboard on that one also did not feel as durable as some of the others. I am still actually considering purchasing the demo Acer we have at the special demo price for K - 12 institutions.

The netbook we chose to go with is the Asus Eee PC 1000HE. It was the students' second favorite behind the  HP 2140. It has several very nice options. The most important one is astronimical battery life. I am using one to write this blog. I am not a normal user and it gives be about 6.5 hours of battery life. To achieve even greater battery life it has a cool little button in the upper left that allows you to turn off the backlight with the touch of a button. Touch any button or the touchpad and it flashes back on. It also has some Mac-like touchpad capabilities. Two-finger scroll, two finger zoom in, zoom out, etc. The keyboard is a little strange at first, but seems more durable that some of the others. The 1000HE has the more classic two button mouse pad design. It has the slightly faster 1.66 GHz. We will upgrade the memory to 2 GB which is also very simple on this machine (2 screws and pop a cover). Other models have no user servicable parts. Its1.3 Mega Pixel camera is superior to others I tested as well. This is the right machine for us, and we will be purchasing at least 100 for next school year.

One of the biggest negatives against netbooks that others claim is that you cannot create with them. I STRONGLY disagree. That is one thing that I knew we would expect these to do, so it is one thing I tested. I created video with the built-in camera. I edited that video with Movie Maker. I edited photos with Gimp and applied many filters and transforms. I created audio with Audacity and manipulated it. Admittedly netbooks are not as fast as full-blown laptops let alone desktops. You have to remember what you are using as your tool. But these tools CAN CREATE.

        

Okoboji Community Schools started taking a learning team based approach to our staff development this past school year. Next year we will attempt to expand that approach to the technology portion of those staff development days. We have been fortunate this past year to have about 2 hours per professional development day for "Tech Time."
 
This "Tech Time" will begin to look very different next year. This past year we delivered our technology staff development in a classic way with some sit-and-get led by me usually to the whole 5-12 group of teachers. This time was followed by work time to work on either what was just shown or some other technology related activity. As research shows, this is not an extremely efficient method of delivering technology staff development. The material being presented is usually only relevant to a small portion of the audience and the rest of them spend the time off task doing other things.

Next year we are going to attempt to deliver our technology related staff development using the learning team approach to our (and hopefully everyone's) advantage. We are going to let the learning teams tell us what they want to learn the next P.D. day. They will be responsible for letting us know what resources they think they will need to learn what they want to learn. We are also planning to rely heavily on collaboration between learning team members rather than instructor led learning. We would like to see a bunch of "this is what worked in my classroom" type conversations. No one is exactly sure how this is going to look and I am sure it will be extremely fluid in its "appearance."

I envision the different teams all exploring different aspects of technology in the classroom. Some being led by an facilitator and others simply having conversations and demonstrations by other team members about hoe tech is working in their rooms. I feel these conversation and demonstrations are going to be a huge key to the success of this approach. Peers getting the ideas flowing with other peers.

Towards the end of the session we would come back together and share what was learned by each group during their "tech time." This sharing will also be crucial to assist in the formation of new ideas between groups. Cross group sharing could also take place during the tech time if the need is there.

I am very much looking forward to this new approach to our technology staff development for next year and I will keep posting about how it's going, new developments, struggles, and triumphs. Keep checking back!

        

This evening at the Okoboji Community Schools board meeting, my purchases of 100 Asus Eee 1000 HE netbooks, 32 HP 6730B notebooks, and 4 netbook carts were approved. We are on a 4 year refresh cycle for our PCs here at Okoboji so these purchases represent those computers due for refresh. The great thing is that we are refreshing out 2 notebook carts with 4 netbook carts bringing out student to computer ratio at the middle school up dramatically.

Also, with some money that was left in this fiscal year's budget we purchased 5 eInstruction Interactive Pad. We are choosing to go with these instead of full blown tablets for the simple fact that we feel we get more 'bang for our buck' with a Interactive Pads plus a regular notebook than we would with a 'full-blown' tablet pc. We tried the whole tablet pc thing and we were terribly disappointed with them. We are hoping that these will also be more mobile and that the teachers will be more willing to hand these over to the students to interact with the lessons more often. We are planning to purchase 7 more of these pads for a 'beta' program in the middle and elementary buildings with the next fiscal budget as well.

As always professional development will be key to the project's success. I will write more on how we plan to do that part in a later post. We have some different ideas about how we will do that part of the project.

        

InterOp Las Vegas was awesome. I learned so much and brought back a ton of ideas for Okoboji Community School District.

I thoroughly enjoyed talking with the sales people and, more so, the engineers that were there pushing their products. VMWare has some very enticing things coming down the pipe in the area of desktop virtualization. This could prove extremely useful to us here at Okoboji. We are currently utilizing some thin client solutions, but VMWare's solutions seem to have many advantaged over what we are doing currently.

I also found Riverbed's WAN optimization intriguing. Okoboji has a slow wireless point to point between our middle school and the rest of the network including the Internet connection. Although there are multiple solution to solve this issue, optimizing that link with Riverbed's Steelhead appliance could be a very affordable one. I sat through a presentation on it and some other WAN optimizers that were there and Riverbed seems to have the most cost-effective solution for us.

I also did much research on different solutions for our web filtering and anti-virus needs. Our current solution is not functioning as we would like and our current anti-virus is too expensive for us. So, my main purpose for going to InterOp was to find us a new solution, and I came back with several ideas all of which I will research further and come up with the solution best for Okoboji. LightSpeed Total Traffic Control is still a front runner, but I think a close competitor is Marshal 8e6. I like LightSpeed's reporting, but Marshal 8e6 is not far behind in that department. I have a lot of work ahead of me this summer to make the right decisions for Okoboji Community School District.

        

Get your twitter mosaic here.

I need more followers. My twitter name is @mrfrerichs. Follow me a http://twitter.com

        

This morning at InterOp 2009 I spent a good deal of time at the HP booth listening to several of their presentation of various products. A very cool product I saw due out in June is an 'appliance' that plugs into existing network wall jacks using P.O.E. and acts as a managed 5 port switch and an access point. This could prove to be a wonderful solution for those pesky dead spots in our wireless network. The only catch is that it requires HP's new wireless controller to run it.

I also talked with some people at Riverbed about their Steelhead appliance that optimizes WAN traffic through more than just caching. It uses some very cool bit level optimization stuff that is way cool. We are needing a solution to 'speed up' a wireless point-to-point between our Middles School and the rest of the network. Right now it is agonizingly slow.Some improvement will come when we install a new point-to-pointe this summer, but if we are ever going to go 1-to-1 in that building, we are going to need to optimize that traffic as much as we can. An appliance such as this would do the trick.