The problem with tablets

Just a little note. Tablets are fun. I like 'em the kids LOVE them, but. and its a big BUT, all you can do is use text in google docs. No inserting drawings or pictures. I tried to get around it. It dosen't happen.

Back to chromebooks. Pity, tablets are fun. And half the price of chromebooks. Still, chromebooks feel more serious and less of a toy.

What have I started?

This google thing is growing. Fast.

What started out as me signing up a couple of schools is rapidly turning into a HUGE thing.

I got 2 schools running. Then I showed it to another school and they got excited too.  Next thing I'm sitting in a meeting with 6 schools who are forming a trust to oversee implementation of google apps and getting devices to students. I hear there are other schools already waiting for the trust to complete its setup and they will join up too.

Then.... I get told yesterday that the secondary schools want a look in too and will I be available to help answer the technical aspects on Google apps for education during an upcoming presentation.

I hope they go for chromebooks. Last count was over 1200 students initially and more coming on board later. Administering that many will be nasty if its not chromebooks.

Wireless Access Points Part 2

Ok, In setting up wireless I have found a few things on the way. When you are running just a few devices on wireless just about anything works. But when you want to run 30 devices in the same room it turns out not all devices are equal.

I have found access points have processors in them and a slow processor just doesn't cut it when they are trying to service 30 devices. If you are going down this road the first rule its don't get a domestic access point. Spend a few extra dollars and go for the commercial ones. They are more up to the task.

Also I found putting a 2nd access point in the room works well too. When a device is taking too long to hook to the first one as its loaded up they will go looking for another less loaded access point.

And one more thing. Chrome books and 802.11N. Make sure you have your security turned up (WPA, not WEP) or they refuse to connect. G is fine, do anything you want, but with N they refuse to connect. They see the AP but that's it.

Windows 8

Microsoft released Windows 8 to those of us with volume licensing today. I happend to be building up a machine so I thought I would give it a try.

Booted up, and got that old familiar error. Windows was unable to find drivers for your cd/dvd device. Dammit Microsft. You can boot with a cd so why cant it use those drivers to run compatability style instead of making me find drivers. Anyway I couldn't be bothered shagging around finding drivers. Went back to windows 7. Started fine.

Ultrafast fibre..... Slowly. Maybe. One day.

I have to admit I can be a bit of a telecom hater. But chorus (run by telecom) is doing a fast job of running fibre out. I go past little okoia school out in the backwoods and there they are putting in fibre. It looks like their connection will be ready within a week. Its a HUGE run. But Tawhero school? Nooooo We are stuck under ultrafast fibre www.ultrafastfibre.co.nz who have managed to connect the golf club 3 blocks away but when do we get fibre? 3 years!!! Every time all the kids go onto khan academy the internet shits itself and the phone system dies. But its ok because the golf club will be able to shave off .005 milliseconds on an eftpos purchase.


Maybe ultrafast fibre should change their name to ultrafail fibre.

Google docs (well, spreadsheet to be precise)

I get a call the other day around 4:30pm from a rather upset woman. "The document I was working on has disappeared. I have been working on it all day". So I turn the car around (I was almost home) and trundle back into town. Her laptop was a little iffy so we rebooted it it and she loaded up the document. It was blank. "There" she says. "Its gone". "Not to worry. Its a google document. If it was microsoft you would be stuffed but watch this" I say, feeling a little smug. I click into revision history, go back to a save made 60 seconds before the last one and there it is. Back in all its glory.

And once again, I'm the hero of the day.

Wireless access points

Hmmmmm. It seems not all access points are made alike. Just because its got faster protocols built in may not ensure it actually works that fast. Particularly when theres 25 devices hanging off it. More info to follow after I try a different brand.

The arrival of the first chromebooks

The Chromebooks finally arrived! I spent an afternoon setting up 18 of them and they were eagerly tested the next morning. Unfortunatly that was when I hit a HUGE snag. I won't bore you with details but in short after a few logged in things went bad. Others wouldnt login, and ones that were went horribly slow and then I started getting EEKS from around the school as the phone system was crashing.
Have you have ever had 18 annoyed primary kids wanting to know why their new toy isn't working while the office staff are pissy cause their phones are dead? Not a good afternoon. I did some digging and calling round. Sadly googles support was quite a mirror of microsoft. People barely able to speak english who just didnt understand what I was asking.
But anyway, I think I may have an answer. The chromebooks were shipped with version 14 and then were trying to automaticaly update all at once to version 20. I havent figured out how big this is but suspect its about 330mb in size. 18 laptops trying to download 330mb of data all at once on a single crappy adsl connection (which is shared by the phones) is not a good idea.
So what to do....... I downloaded chromes version of a rescue disk and did a restore on each laptop. Which upgraded the software to the latest version. This was done on a Saturday afternoon. Now to wait for Monday to see if it worked..........

There is hope for UFB

Looks like UFB will have hope afterall.


http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/callplus-offers-unlimited-ufb-plans-business-schools-ck-124407

Prices are becoming reasonable. Now we just have to wait for fibre to make it out here. Roll on good prices and 2014-2015 (which is when fibre is supposed to be turning up).

Google Streetview goes offroad

In one of those thats cool moments google has taken streetview off the beaten track.... Way off. check out this link http://googleblog.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/become-antarctic-explorer-with.html and you can see some pics of a few huts in antartica. Real neat. Ad if you have some anaglyph glasses (the old 2 coloured 3d movie glasses) you can right click and turn on 3d too.

Investing in Technology

2 seperate headlines from the NZ Herald yesterday

 

Microsoft reports first loss as public company

Online ads help Google post $3.4b profit

When looking at investing in technology for the future I think this is quite a sign as to whos platform is becomming most popular.

Dashboard

The most used function in the google dashboard is......... Drumroll.................. Changing the password because the user has forgotten it. I'm sure it will sort itself out when people use the system more and more. At least thats what I keep telling myself.

Smart phones

I know, I know theres already software out there that does the job but none of it does it all in one spot. Hmmmm, backtrack here. Did you know that google apps can register your cellphones in the dashboard (thats the nifty admin interface that ties everything together) and you can do lots of little things to keep them safe (or disabled) if they are lost or stolen? Cool stuff.

UFB in New Zealand.

Ultrafast Broadband In New Zealand. Why we need it and why its going to fail (at first).

I tried to show a class of 25 students how to use google maps recently. The exercise was to find their home and then show a picture of it using streetview. It worked for the quickest 4 and then the internet in the school crashed. Well, it didnt really crash it just got so overloaded that it wasnt able to process data until everyone closed out.
As we move towards cloud based computing the demands on the internet are going to become huge and the old copper system just can't manage it. After the Christchurch earthquakes we also saw what happens when servers and data gets trapped inside a danger zone. Imagine being able to send a backup of the company server to off site storage automatically every night.
Phone systems will be making their calls over the internet (some even do it now). Infact one of the schools I manage has a phone system that when someone leaves voicemail it turns it into an mp3 file and emails it to the recipient. Very handy as they can receive voice messages no matter where they are.
 Some of the schools want to put in long range wirleless systems so students can take their chromebooks home and still access the internet and their cloud based files (an estimated 50 - 60% of parents in low socio economic areas have no phone line or internet, choosing to use mobile phones instead).
But heres the problem. All these things require not only speed but they use a lot of data. And New Zealand telecommunications suppliers can't seem to get the data cap idea out of their head. Once again we will be restriceted to paying huge prices for any reasonable amount of data.
A business using 100gb of data per month will be faced with $189+GST per month at full speed.
If that business or school is considered rural there will be another $200+GST per month on top of the other price as chorus has decided to charge a rural premium for services (good one NZ government for letting that one through).

All we can do is hope our internet providers realise that what we really need is data at reasonable prices. Sadly this has rarely been the case so far. I don't see them changing their minds in a hurry yet. This is one time I hope to be proven wrong.

Yesterday I placed the big order. Tawhero school is soon to be the owner of 46 brand spanking new chromebooks. Now I have to wait for them to arrive. I hate waiting for new toys.

Just a quick note. I just spotted that the keyboard buttons are lower case not upper case. This wont make a lot of difference to adults but small children learn lowercase letters before capitals and they often have trouble relating to keyboards in their younger years. So there we have yet another reason to go chromebooks in a primary school.

(this blogpost was typed on a chromebook)

Squeeeeeeeeee! Sad. I'm a 38 year old guy and I'm going Squeeeeeeeeeee. One of the schools managed to secure $20,000 funding for the purpose of buying more computers. This has been topped up with a further $5,000 from fundraising. Care has to be taken. We need the right solution. A balance of power, price, and ease of use. There was no room in the budget for an increase in my hours for mantenance so they have to be damn near unkillable.We needed portable so a class could use them for an extened period of time before being moved to another class. We needed long battery life so they could run all day without a charge.

The solution........ Chromebooks. After some inquiries I found a New Zealand agent for chromebooks, shamless plug here!!! http://www.fronde.com The chaps at Fronde hooked me up with a trial book and I am impressed. They werent talking crap, it really does boot in 20seconds. From out of the box to using it on the network was less than 5 mins. (about 2 mins now I know what I'm doing). Thats the kind of speed I want and need.
Also the.... feel. Yes, its still plastic but it just feels solid. I don't feel like its about to fall apart after I use it for a few months. I feel confidant it will take a pounding and be ready for more.
Also the guest mode on these books is great in a school. As soon as you shut down (it takes about 5 seconds) all temp files and downloads are wiped. Thats going to save a bundle on time and maintenance. Theres hardly any settings to play with. The sound consists of 2 things. Volume up and volume down. The end. Trying to get sound going in the computer suite when the seniors have been fiddling with the mixer is quite an annoyance.
I got the principal in to show him. His comment was "the screen is sharp"! Thats non tech person speak for "I like the high definition resolution of the monitor while running youtube videos".
Do I have a negative? Yes. One, the speakers start clipping and distorting when you turn up the sound. But thats probably a good thing. Imagine 30 chromebooks in a classroom all playing sound loudly. The teachers would go nuts. The students will be using headphones.
But thats it. 1 small thing but so many positives. Sure it only goes on the net. But with google apps most things are on there anyway. Move over local computing, here comes the cloud!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, I admit it. I love google apps. This just keeps getting better. And I want to tell you about all the cool things it can do. But lets pull back a second. Back to the low descile schools and no money thing. What are the monetary advantages of going google? How will I save money by changing the way we run our networks. Well, first up. Less storage on the servers. As for the email servers. They can be shut down (or repurposed).
And those 10 year old desktops? They only need an internet connection. I have been playing around with Linux. There is a version called browser linux. Its 100mb in size. It boots fast, takes only minutes to install and its hard to kill. The only problem at this point is I cant get the sound running. I will play more with that later.

So, heres me looking at google apps. The more I look the better it gets.
Lets stop for a sec and look at google drive (formerly known as google docs). OK. how often do you think. "Dammit, that file is on my computer at home (or work)". Probably not that often but there are times. Or, heres the scary one. What would you do if your computer fried itself. Right now, this very second. How recent are your backups? Imagine if that was thing of the past. All your files are stored online, in a secure location, with backups done for you! Do you have a PC? Mac? Linux? what if you were out and you needed to edit a document. Just a small change before emailing it off. With google drive your word processor (or spreadsheet) is online. All you need is an internet connection, the device is not important and you can open and edit that document, no correct software or version required.

Heres another biggie. Have you ever shared a document with someone on the network and they have it open but you want to make changes to it. You the the read only version. No editing allowed because someone else already has it open. Well. With files on google drive multiple people can open and edit the same file at the same time. No problem!!!!!

Imma loving this system.

My discovery was just what google could do. Almost everyone knows gmail, the google email system, But it does more, a LOT more.

Say hello to google apps for education. Please, take the 10 mins to watch this video. Don't worry,  I'll still be here when you get back.

It took some thought and a lot of research. It wasnt until I had a problem with the email system at one of the schools that I started looking at Google.
I have had a gmail account for a few years now. I have changed my ISP a few times over the years and each time its a pain in the butt getting a new emaill address, getting eveyone to change over to that address and the whole setup thing. So I signed up for gmail. Great move. 1 email address, no need to change it. Ever.
I remembered reading somewhere that you could tie a domain to gmail. So I took a look at what gmail could do. Heres where I made a discovery.................

OK, So why am I here creating this blog? Lets start with some background. I work in whats called low descile primary schools. These are schools where the parents predominantly aren't too well off. My job in these schools is to run the ICT department. These schools dont have a lot of money and I find I am working with older computers, some of them are 9 - 10 years old. This can be a big ask and I find myself spending a good 80% of my time patching up computers. Just trying to get them to run so they can be used for a while longer.


There has to be a better way......................