Depends on the framework... we use Brainhoney which integrates pretty well with Google Docs; which is fortunate for us as we're rolling out a pretty extensive 1:1 Chromebook initiative this year.
Don't take that as a rebuttal to your point, though -- we lucked out, truth be told. It's not as if we planned that to begin with, it was merely a happy coincidence.
As a result, we're modeling our blended learning programs around the idea of the Chromebook/Google Drive as a tool to collect and prepare content and our labs as a place to create the final presentation: Content is prepared on the go and assembled (if need be) in a lab. Of course, the side effect to all this is transitioning to a Google district (zero to ~50k accounts over the last week) and the sanity of that is up for debate.
It's also meant a myriad of third party solutions to be brought in... Gaggle (email and document discovery), Hapara (teacher dashboard), integration with our SIS, synchronizing AD with Google for accounts and passwords... all so we can transition from cheap laptops/netbooks to cheaper Chromebooks.
Sorry, rambling. Early morning coffee... I now live, breathe and eat Google. Quite a change from the last few years of iPads (and, in certain ways, welcome -- at least there are real tools available for management!).
Best of luck to your daughter. Stay involved; the whole on online learning game is a new one.
I've created thousands of iTunes accounts and I just bashed out 70 Monday morning (I'm an Apple sysadmin with over 4 thousand iPads in a large school district, no underlings, minions or temps at my disposal. How I wish Apple would allow for a simple.csv import to create accounts...).
You don't even need to specify a "free" account as it now defaults that way -- as long as you begin the process by "buying" a free app. All you need is an email address to receive the verification email.
My workflow starts with iBooks. It's free, so the follow up "payment options" is defaulted to "None" when building the account itself.
I respectfully disagree. With the persistent sway of legal favouritism toward corporate entities, not private citizens, now is precisely the time to worry.
Ben Croshaw (aka Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation) also does an admirable job; to the point of questioning how video games can achieve the status of art when so many AAA producers refuse to break away from bad television cliches.
Back on topic, never having known the man (Roger Ebert, that is), I'm still saddened by his passing. He was a standard in his field -- and always appeared to approach his task with professionalism and genuine integrity. Regardless of whether I agreed or disagreed with his final view, I managed to respect him for his efforts.
Somewhere between the two was YDL on a first gen G4. Yaboot was a piece of cake, throw Windowmaker on post install. All the goodness I needed until OS X got up to speed.
Yup, YDL first, too. Kept it going until my old Yikes G4 bit the dust.
Got the buzz and went Redhat on x86 from there for a bit, then Debian, played with Gentoo during my Debian days and then realized my Debian days would probably never end.
My work life is primarily OS X (read: ARD and a crap load of ssh sessions) on the desktop and a fair mixture of Linux and OS X Server in the rack (I've still got a couple of Xserves...). Home is a fair mix of Win 7, OS X and Linux (FreeBSD if you count FreeNAS, but you probably shouldn't as it just sits and runs without interference).
Booting into Win 7, I get an immediate jolt of discomfort. Apps run as expected (stable and mostly sane), but I feel weird having to reach for Putty to get into my comfort zone. This is much less pronounced with a *nix box, but if I invoke a GUI (outside of WMaker or wmii), it feels... flimsy, cheap.
I despise so much of Apple's direction and philosophy; but damn it all. They make a slick OS that's downright comfortable.
The educational market doesn't focus on Linux, hell, they barely focus on Macs (disturbingly, although not surprisingly, they are all over the iOS band wagon; which is why I'll have four thousand of iPads by fall).
We have all kinds of state mandates as to what is taught and how dollars are spent (i.e. state approved vendors). Tech in education is NOT what many of us grew up with. The day of a mismashed C64/A2 lab held together with duct tape by a volunteer group of kids playing D&D every afternoon are over. Because kids cutting their teeth learning to write a program that accesses a flat text file, draw a moire pattern on the screen and other activities that teach basic concepts are over.
Primary tech is all about Lexia, Compass, First in Math and the like. It's a bunch of crap, substandard, third party software thrown onto a SMART board. It's got zero to do with life prep, it has everything to do with reinforcing the drill and test mentality while building brand loyalty.
I love Linux. I'm at my most comfortable with a fresh Debian netinstall and moving on from there. But this is education we're talking about. If it isn't "media rich", "Web 2.0 ready!", "Cloud enabled for a dynamic user experience!" or whatever bullshit catch phrase that is being spewed this week, it doesn't go anywhere.
Maybe my district is just too big. Perhaps this kind of idealism really is still possible in a small district (in which case, I need to find a new fucking job). But in my experience thus far, K-12 has turned into prestage for Corporate America. If it's not being used in the cubicle farm, it's got slim chance in the primary educational market.
It's all about numbers. Just trade profit margin for graduation percentages -- and if your numbers aren't high enough, prepare to have your funding cut.
Cheapo used market PC, invest in some large drives and a couple of drive docks, install FreeNAS.
Take a weekend to organize your data however it makes sense (by year, subject, file type, whatever), and store it on a particular drive. Rinse wash and repeat. Depending on how important the data is, store in a fireproof safe onsite, or offsite. When (read: if) you need the data again, dock the drive and retrieve.
Personally, I'm about to liberate myself from years of data. I'm tired of all these bloody drives and the annual, "I really want to look at _______ again". It's amazing how much of that crap has zero personal value anymore. (This isn't a comment on your data, but mine.)
OS X is complete and utter crap, you hear me? There's no bash or csh or ksh or anything like that! You can't ssh into a remote box and work from your Mac in an OTB situation, nor can you remote into your Mac and screen a session.
There's no vim, emacs or even nano (for someone wetting their feet); there's only TextEdit and you can only save to.iexclusivetextdocumentformat! Why without tab autocompletion, (semi)sane directory structure think of how impossible it is for someone worth their technical salt to find their way around! Just imagine a photograph of Mardi Gras, that's the exact kind of chaos that comes to my mind whenever I consider needing to edit/etc/hosts or tail/var/log/system.log on a Mac!
You cannot, absolutely cannot compile anything; you hear me? If it isn't able to be installed from Apple's walled garden, then it doesn't exist. No ability to build gcc, no ports installer, no way to install and invoke frotz, mp3blaster and htop in a three way, multi-panelled terminal session so that people think I'm doing something important when I'm really just trying to get that god damned fish into my ear while listening to 8 bit centric podcasts!
The Mac is clearly nothing but a n00b machine that costs too much!
good lord I'm off topic. I really need to cut down my caffeine.
Was it the 80's (the whole dad, D&D and the devil)? The 80's fucked me over, too. Geraldo, Oprah and that other one... Phil. Jesus, between D&D and Iron Maiden, I'm surprised a single child made it through the 80's without being sacrificed to the prince of darkness...
My standing rule for working from home (I spent years as a consultant and often find myself telecommuting with my current job): Get up at the same time you would if you were to go in, get dressed, shower, shave (if that's your thing), brush your teeth, have breakfast/coffee/etc... away from your work space. At the point you would typically leave for work, sit down at your desk. Do so dressed as you would at work.
Keep your desk in the same state you would feel comfortable at your job. If you smoke, go outside for a typical smoke break. If you stop for coffee, do so by walking away from your desk.
Take lunch away from your work space.
Finally, log off VPN at the end of "your shift". Don't fall into the habit of "working late", it's only going to set a habit of allowing your schedule to fluctuate and will make you less productive where it matters.
If you weren't impressed with 10.5/6, you'd absolutely roll your eyes at 10.7. Start with the fact that it's a sub-$50 component addon to the client OS downloadable via the App store and proceed from there.
While this is true, it doesn't take policies and politics into account. We have three acceptable options that have been approved. WIndows Server, Fedora (I have to keep my Debian projects in my cubicle) and OS X Server. *BSD is not welcome to the party.
I can also virtualize OS X Server and migrate said image to real iron -- but licensing doesn't allow for it and the higher seats insist on remaining compliant.
iTunes Configuration Utility is a tool to create and inject XML profiles into the device for management purposes (configure WIFI, email, restrictions, etc...). It doesn't deploy apps, activate the device (not necessary since iOS 5), perform backups/restore (you can actually do this via command line). It also doesn't handle firmware upgrades (The only tool publicly available from Apple that is semi-useful for deployment is Xcode (you can chain and deploy firmware on multiple devices at a time).
Without jailbreaking, your options for sane management are near zero. Pick a MDM, build a workflow that makes sense to you and gain enough support from above so that you write the dept. bible (which will need constant revisions as you continually realize something else you could have done differently).
Managing these things with anything resembling enterprise sensibility is a lesson in pain. I've got somewhere close to 2500 of them on the network... I think of little else these days.
Back in September, Apple paid a visit to our district to look over our iPad deployment (which, given the tools that are available and the requirements I was filling for granular group management, I'll admit to be rather pleased with).
I was told that we (I) did it wrong -- and that we had to let go of this archaic view of software as a licensed investment and view it as "paper and pens". This is, obviously, the new party line.
The announcement came in November of '10, three months before they killed off the Xserves (one year ago -- last January).
I'm now surviving on two Xserves (one '08 and one early '10) and a small stack of Minis (due to my two G5 Xserves falling apart last year). We've got big iron on the other side of the house with everything virtualized -- and I'm running Minis...
Apple is not courting enterprise, it's the other way around. The prom queen isn't hurting for dates.
Slashdot Mirror
You know it. Carts before horses. Every year is something new and last year's new just isn't sexy enough to revisit.
We're a big operation with a small shop. I'll be wrapped in this duct tape for quite a while.
Depends on the framework... we use Brainhoney which integrates pretty well with Google Docs; which is fortunate for us as we're rolling out a pretty extensive 1:1 Chromebook initiative this year.
Don't take that as a rebuttal to your point, though -- we lucked out, truth be told. It's not as if we planned that to begin with, it was merely a happy coincidence.
As a result, we're modeling our blended learning programs around the idea of the Chromebook/Google Drive as a tool to collect and prepare content and our labs as a place to create the final presentation: Content is prepared on the go and assembled (if need be) in a lab. Of course, the side effect to all this is transitioning to a Google district (zero to ~50k accounts over the last week) and the sanity of that is up for debate.
It's also meant a myriad of third party solutions to be brought in... Gaggle (email and document discovery), Hapara (teacher dashboard), integration with our SIS, synchronizing AD with Google for accounts and passwords... all so we can transition from cheap laptops/netbooks to cheaper Chromebooks.
Sorry, rambling. Early morning coffee... I now live, breathe and eat Google. Quite a change from the last few years of iPads (and, in certain ways, welcome -- at least there are real tools available for management!).
Best of luck to your daughter. Stay involved; the whole on online learning game is a new one.
No, you don't.
I've created thousands of iTunes accounts and I just bashed out 70 Monday morning (I'm an Apple sysadmin with over 4 thousand iPads in a large school district, no underlings, minions or temps at my disposal. How I wish Apple would allow for a simple .csv import to create accounts...).
You don't even need to specify a "free" account as it now defaults that way -- as long as you begin the process by "buying" a free app. All you need is an email address to receive the verification email.
My workflow starts with iBooks. It's free, so the follow up "payment options" is defaulted to "None" when building the account itself.
I respectfully disagree. With the persistent sway of legal favouritism toward corporate entities, not private citizens, now is precisely the time to worry.
Ben Croshaw (aka Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation) also does an admirable job; to the point of questioning how video games can achieve the status of art when so many AAA producers refuse to break away from bad television cliches.
Back on topic, never having known the man (Roger Ebert, that is), I'm still saddened by his passing. He was a standard in his field -- and always appeared to approach his task with professionalism and genuine integrity. Regardless of whether I agreed or disagreed with his final view, I managed to respect him for his efforts.
..and you can use Terminology to edit that Hosts file, too.
Who'd have thought this troll would have an actual reference point to a submission...
Somewhere between the two was YDL on a first gen G4. Yaboot was a piece of cake, throw Windowmaker on post install. All the goodness I needed until OS X got up to speed.
That was a sexy G4 back in '00.
Yup, YDL first, too. Kept it going until my old Yikes G4 bit the dust.
Got the buzz and went Redhat on x86 from there for a bit, then Debian, played with Gentoo during my Debian days and then realized my Debian days would probably never end.
So far, they haven't.
Dude, I didn't roll a lawful/good character. Deal with my chaotic/evil ways. :P
There are management agents which can deploy software on macs. Generally, they cost a lot and suck.
Not really the case. InstaDMG, DeployStudio and Munki will get you quite far down the road without a dollar spent and not much by way of a headache.
Yeah, pretty much.
My work life is primarily OS X (read: ARD and a crap load of ssh sessions) on the desktop and a fair mixture of Linux and OS X Server in the rack (I've still got a couple of Xserves...). Home is a fair mix of Win 7, OS X and Linux (FreeBSD if you count FreeNAS, but you probably shouldn't as it just sits and runs without interference).
Booting into Win 7, I get an immediate jolt of discomfort. Apps run as expected (stable and mostly sane), but I feel weird having to reach for Putty to get into my comfort zone. This is much less pronounced with a *nix box, but if I invoke a GUI (outside of WMaker or wmii), it feels... flimsy, cheap.
I despise so much of Apple's direction and philosophy; but damn it all. They make a slick OS that's downright comfortable.
Jesus.
The educational market doesn't focus on Linux, hell, they barely focus on Macs (disturbingly, although not surprisingly, they are all over the iOS band wagon; which is why I'll have four thousand of iPads by fall).
We have all kinds of state mandates as to what is taught and how dollars are spent (i.e. state approved vendors). Tech in education is NOT what many of us grew up with. The day of a mismashed C64/A2 lab held together with duct tape by a volunteer group of kids playing D&D every afternoon are over. Because kids cutting their teeth learning to write a program that accesses a flat text file, draw a moire pattern on the screen and other activities that teach basic concepts are over.
Primary tech is all about Lexia, Compass, First in Math and the like. It's a bunch of crap, substandard, third party software thrown onto a SMART board. It's got zero to do with life prep, it has everything to do with reinforcing the drill and test mentality while building brand loyalty.
I love Linux. I'm at my most comfortable with a fresh Debian netinstall and moving on from there. But this is education we're talking about. If it isn't "media rich", "Web 2.0 ready!", "Cloud enabled for a dynamic user experience!" or whatever bullshit catch phrase that is being spewed this week, it doesn't go anywhere.
Maybe my district is just too big. Perhaps this kind of idealism really is still possible in a small district (in which case, I need to find a new fucking job). But in my experience thus far, K-12 has turned into prestage for Corporate America. If it's not being used in the cubicle farm, it's got slim chance in the primary educational market.
It's all about numbers. Just trade profit margin for graduation percentages -- and if your numbers aren't high enough, prepare to have your funding cut.
Sigh.
How often do you really need gigabit?
Every time I expect a policy for a system reimage to succeed.
David Brin must be openly grinning over this.
Cheapo used market PC, invest in some large drives and a couple of drive docks, install FreeNAS.
Take a weekend to organize your data however it makes sense (by year, subject, file type, whatever), and store it on a particular drive. Rinse wash and repeat. Depending on how important the data is, store in a fireproof safe onsite, or offsite. When (read: if) you need the data again, dock the drive and retrieve.
Personally, I'm about to liberate myself from years of data. I'm tired of all these bloody drives and the annual, "I really want to look at _______ again". It's amazing how much of that crap has zero personal value anymore. (This isn't a comment on your data, but mine.)
It was the best mod up I could give you at the time. Those damn things are never around when you want them.
No, no, no. Don't mention that OS X has a shell.
OS X is complete and utter crap, you hear me? There's no bash or csh or ksh or anything like that! You can't ssh into a remote box and work from your Mac in an OTB situation, nor can you remote into your Mac and screen a session.
There's no vim, emacs or even nano (for someone wetting their feet); there's only TextEdit and you can only save to .iexclusivetextdocumentformat! Why without tab autocompletion, (semi)sane directory structure think of how impossible it is for someone worth their technical salt to find their way around! Just imagine a photograph of Mardi Gras, that's the exact kind of chaos that comes to my mind whenever I consider needing to edit /etc/hosts or tail /var/log/system.log on a Mac!
You cannot, absolutely cannot compile anything; you hear me? If it isn't able to be installed from Apple's walled garden, then it doesn't exist. No ability to build gcc, no ports installer, no way to install and invoke frotz, mp3blaster and htop in a three way, multi-panelled terminal session so that people think I'm doing something important when I'm really just trying to get that god damned fish into my ear while listening to 8 bit centric podcasts!
The Mac is clearly nothing but a n00b machine that costs too much!
good lord I'm off topic. I really need to cut down my caffeine.
Was it the 80's (the whole dad, D&D and the devil)? The 80's fucked me over, too. Geraldo, Oprah and that other one... Phil. Jesus, between D&D and Iron Maiden, I'm surprised a single child made it through the 80's without being sacrificed to the prince of darkness...
My standing rule for working from home (I spent years as a consultant and often find myself telecommuting with my current job): Get up at the same time you would if you were to go in, get dressed, shower, shave (if that's your thing), brush your teeth, have breakfast/coffee/etc... away from your work space. At the point you would typically leave for work, sit down at your desk. Do so dressed as you would at work.
Keep your desk in the same state you would feel comfortable at your job. If you smoke, go outside for a typical smoke break. If you stop for coffee, do so by walking away from your desk.
Take lunch away from your work space.
Finally, log off VPN at the end of "your shift". Don't fall into the habit of "working late", it's only going to set a habit of allowing your schedule to fluctuate and will make you less productive where it matters.
If you weren't impressed with 10.5/6, you'd absolutely roll your eyes at 10.7. Start with the fact that it's a sub-$50 component addon to the client OS downloadable via the App store and proceed from there.
Calling it a workgroup server is a stretch.
While this is true, it doesn't take policies and politics into account. We have three acceptable options that have been approved. WIndows Server, Fedora (I have to keep my Debian projects in my cubicle) and OS X Server. *BSD is not welcome to the party.
I can also virtualize OS X Server and migrate said image to real iron -- but licensing doesn't allow for it and the higher seats insist on remaining compliant.
iTunes Configuration Utility is a tool to create and inject XML profiles into the device for management purposes (configure WIFI, email, restrictions, etc...). It doesn't deploy apps, activate the device (not necessary since iOS 5), perform backups/restore (you can actually do this via command line). It also doesn't handle firmware upgrades (The only tool publicly available from Apple that is semi-useful for deployment is Xcode (you can chain and deploy firmware on multiple devices at a time).
Without jailbreaking, your options for sane management are near zero. Pick a MDM, build a workflow that makes sense to you and gain enough support from above so that you write the dept. bible (which will need constant revisions as you continually realize something else you could have done differently).
Managing these things with anything resembling enterprise sensibility is a lesson in pain. I've got somewhere close to 2500 of them on the network... I think of little else these days.
Hey, now wait a second. I started off with an Apple IIe. I was using Apple products long before...
Oh, fuck me.
Back in September, Apple paid a visit to our district to look over our iPad deployment (which, given the tools that are available and the requirements I was filling for granular group management, I'll admit to be rather pleased with).
I was told that we (I) did it wrong -- and that we had to let go of this archaic view of software as a licensed investment and view it as "paper and pens". This is, obviously, the new party line.
I only wish it were a few years ago.
The announcement came in November of '10, three months before they killed off the Xserves (one year ago -- last January).
I'm now surviving on two Xserves (one '08 and one early '10) and a small stack of Minis (due to my two G5 Xserves falling apart last year). We've got big iron on the other side of the house with everything virtualized -- and I'm running Minis...
Apple is not courting enterprise, it's the other way around. The prom queen isn't hurting for dates.