What needs to be done?

The Minimum: Every 3 months, remove and clean the air filters on the projector. This procedure is outlined in your Owners Manual.
Service it: Perform projector and Smartboard maintenance which includes:

1. Cleaning of panels
2. Circuit board check
3. Lens cleaning
4. Fan lubrication
5. Filter Cleaning
6. Lamp Life Check *

Lamp? What lamp?
The lamp in your projector is a consumable item. Again, a little different than a TV. (So if you’re not using the projector in your computer lab, turn it OFF!) A typical digital projector lamp has a life of around 1000 hours under cool, gentle, and very clean conditions.

NEC’s eco-mode option helps prolong lamp life, it’s a ‘low beam’ alternative. What you will notice about digital projector lamps is that rather than blowing, they gradually dim over time. All projectors have lamp meters that indicate the hours of lamp life remaining or used. If you’re getting close to the 1000 hour mark, get your replacement ready.

A replacement lamp will cost £180-£300. A chunk of change. Can your school really afford to keep buying replacements?

A digital projector is a considerable investment. Make it someone’s responsibility to maintain it. Should you have any questions regarding projector maintenance, please drop us a message (before you have to ask “Why are those yellow spots dotting our every picture?”)

Prey is a lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. Prey lets you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. You can quickly find out where your laptop is located, who’s using it, and … a picture of the thief with your laptop’s webcam so you know what he looks like  It’s lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use.

How it works?
“Basically you install a tiny agent in your PC or phone, which silently waits for a remote signal to wake up and work its magic. This signal is sent either from the Internet or through an SMS message, and allows you to gather information regarding the device’s location, hardware and network status, and optionally trigger specific actions on it.” – preyproject.com

Watch now and it just works !

Prey Project introduction from Carlos Yaconi on Vimeo.

Prey lets you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. It’s lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. And it just works.

As we may already aware, Windows Operating System such as XP, Vista and Windows 7 tend to allow users to save their works in My Documents, My Pictures, My Music or on the Desktop. For teachers who have a dedicated desktop computer in the office this is fine but in computer labs environment it’s definitely not a good idea to store learners’ work on the local machine. The main reason is that the files stored on the desktop machine will not be backed up. Second important reason is student tend to move from lab to lab or they may not use the same machine everytime they enter the lab.

In the past, school ICT administrator will create a network folder for each learner on the server. If the learner would like to save his/her work on the server, he/she will need to find the map drive, look for his/her own personal folder, type the file name and finally click ‘save’. As we can see here, this is really an inefficient way of saving works on the server. It involves too many clicks before the learners could actually save/retrieve his/her works from the network folder.

So the solution is ‘Folder Redirection’. Folder redirection is a great way to save learners work to servers rather than on a local machine. With Folder Redirection, learners no longer need to locate his/her network drive and personal folder. Learners can simply save their works on My Documents folder or Desktop and all the files will be automatically ‘sync’ to the server. This means that the data will be backed up on the server and also means that learner’s data is available from whichever workstation or mobile devices they choose to use.

In most schools, this is in line with “anytime anywhere” learning strategy.

Literally, FOUR separate data areas can be redirected: -

• My Documents
• Desktop
• Appication Data
• Start menu

I strongly recommend redirecting both the ‘Desktop’ and ‘My Document’ folder as these are the most critical areas that hold up-to-date learner data.

What about ‘Application Data’ folder?
Application data folder holds user preferences for applications and can be take care of with ‘Roaming User profiles’,

What about ‘Start Menu’?
We normally don’t actually need to redirect ‘Start Menu’ as this is usually applicable to kiosk style workstation to perform limited tasks.

How does it Work?

1. Grant permission to a Domain Local group on the network share used to hold the Redirected folders
2. Create a shared folder to store all learners’ data eg. \server_nameshare_name$
3. Use Active Directory Group Policy to configure users redirection setting.

Advantages
Folder redirection provides a number of advantages. Some of the following benefits can be particularly benefits our learners and teachers: -

• Even if a learner logs on to various computers on the school network, the learners documents are always available.
• The system administrator can use Group Policy to set disk quotas, limiting the amount of space taken up by learners’ special folders.
• Data specific to a learner can be redirected to the network server storage. This protects the learner’s data if the desktop/laptop operating system needs to be reinstalled.
• Data stored on a shared network server can be backed up as part of routine system administration. This is safer and it requires no action on the part of the learner.

Jim had an ICT lesson in the ICT Suite and was working on an excel file. Before the school bell rings, he saved his work in the ‘My Documents’ folder and log-off from the computer. Since it’s a lunch time, Jim decided to grab a quick bite and return to the LRC to continue his works on the spreadsheet. In the LRC, he log-in with his usual school username/password and double click on the ‘My Documents’ folder to launch the excel spreadsheet. When he finished, he saved his work and left the LRC to go to his next lesson. After school, while waiting for his mum; he took out his laptop and had it connected to the school wireless network. Again, all his files, music, photos and favorites will be available on his laptop without any needs to find the school server, map the network drives, locate his personal folder so on and so fought.

Further information

Further information and recommendations for using Folder Redirection is available from the Microsoft site, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;232692

OR

Join our ‘Folder Redirection’ online workshop today at http://www.icteduc.com/moodle/course/view.php?id=17

But how can we connect our classic printer to Google Cloud Print? The answer is simple. Download and install Google Chrome, activate the Google Cloud Printer connector in Google Chrome and your printer will automatically be available to you from Google Cloud Print enabled web and mobile apps.

Have fun!

What is FITS?

FITS is simply a set of best practice advice and guidance introduced by BECTA, UK. In the process of contructing this framework, BECTA have used some of the best practices found in ITIL (the leading framework for ICT support for commercial) and formulate a new framework for how ICT support should operate within schools.

FIT should help us to make ICT provision and support in our school as efficient and effective as possible. It has been designed to help us think of ICT support as a service that we are providing to our school and managing it in that way. FITS identifies 10 main processes as below which form a cycle:

We could start picking one of this process to work on and keep going round to make improvements to our ICT service.

Reasons for implementing FITS (Becta, 2006)

• Improved strategic and financial planning for ICT
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership through increased efficiency, effectiveness and management assets
• Better communications and relationships between ICT support teams and users
• A move away from firefighting to a more structured, proactive approach to service delivery
• Faster response times to requests for help and support
• Increased reliability through planned and methodical roll-out of new equipment and network changes
• Increased user satisfaction by setting their expectations more clearly.

The most successful schools believe that FITS can help to improve teaching and learning since teachers feel more confident in the reliability of the network equipment and can focus on using the technology rather than worrying if it will work. Ultimately, FITS will improve school performance and leads to better inspection outcomes.

In my next post, I will discuss some of my action plan to best implement the FITS processes. If you like this post, please comment or consider subscribing to my full RSS feed, Retweet, share via Twitter, Facebook or Digg.

1. Alston Primary School
2. Chipping Sodbury School
3. Headcorn School
4. Bryn Deri Primary School
5. Swinton Queen Primary
6. Rye College
7. St Andrew’s CE Primary School
8. Thomas Tallis School
9. Alexandra Community Primary School
10. Cogan Primary
11. Portishead Primary School

In brief, having an ICT vision for school is important to school leadership. It’s simply because vision is a source of motivation and energy. It powerfully shapes practices within our school community. Thus vision needs to be understood, articulated and owned by the whole school community. It provides both a source of inspiration and a frame of reference for developing professional values (becal.net).

• How much space should we allocate for each learner?
• How to alert the users when they are about to reach their quota threshold?
• How can we stop our learners from saving mp3, games and large movie files?

In the past, we often need to invest on some sort of Disk Quota Management software such as WinQuota, SpaceGuard SRM, etc which can cost us a fortune in getting the solutions in place.

Good News!

With Windows 2008 Server, we can use File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) to manage and monitor our storage activitis on our file server. The main capabilities of FSRM include:

1. Folder quotas
2. File screening
3. storage reports
4. event long and email notification
5. Automated scripting

In our school, we have recently enabled FSRM to limit the size of our students folder to 5GB and log an event when the quota limit is reached. Email notification will be sent to the administrator whenever a specific folder/drive reaches 80% of its specified threshold. We have also activated the File Screening function to prevent learners from saving mp3/video/games to their Home Drive. Again, notification will be sent to the Administrator when users attempt to do that and a copy of the report will be forwarded to Pastoral office for further action.

If you are interested to try FSRM in your school, read along to get more details at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771092%28WS.10%29.aspx

Good luck!

These are the questions we must ask ourselves:

• What sort of education do we want to see in future?
• What sorts of learning relationships do we want to foster?
• What competencies do we want learners to develop?
• What tools and resources are available to us to support learning?
• What buildings do we want?
• How many computers do we need?
  (Re-Imagining Learning Spaces – Futurelab, 2006)

In general, the school’s overall ICT vision should:

• includes all members of the school community
• link to the school’s wider aims and aspirations
• involve all stakeholders such as governors, parents and local community
• includes how technology be used by learners, teachers, parents, carers and the community – personalising the learning experience
• identify how technology be used to support and enhance learning, teaching, administration and management – flexible learning environment
• expresses clearly how technology be used innovatively to impact on attainment, achievement, attendance and other areas of the school
• support all staff through professional development, providing tools for collaboration, management and administration
• enable secure and reliable communications between the school and parents, other schools, local community

Becta (2009) asserted, an effective vision for ICT supports and enhances the school’s aims; it enables our school to support personalisation and offer flexible ‘anytime anywhere’ access. It allows data to be managed efficiently, appropriately and securely. Most importantly the ICT vision must be aspirational, achievable and helping our school to transform education.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Proverbs 29:18

In the next post, I will publish some of the best examples of ICT vision statements from schools in the UK and around the world. Also, I will explain how to develop a strategy to achieve the whole school ICT vision by using the Self Review Framework.

The new site is still under construction but we will continue posting quality articles and updates. A big thank you to all our readers. We hope that you will enjoy our new site and it will become your destination for Online ICT resources – leadership, teaching and learning!

Michael

Thanks Dan Trouten for giving me ideas to write this post.

As I mentioned in Moodle Lounge, the easiest way is to embed the flash movie into the HTML code by following these simple steps:

1. open the Flash movie file we have created and export it as “yourfilename.swf”.
2. upload ‘yourfilename.swf’ to our video hosting server where the file suppose to be stored.
3. In the Moodle topic box where we want to see the video, select ‘Compose a webpage’ from the ‘Add a resource’ menu.
4. Insert this code:

<object width=”450″ height=”300″>
<param name=”movie” value=”yourfilename.swf”>
http://yourfilename.swf
</embed>
</object>

Also, as pointed out by Randy Orwin, we could install Kaltura and have our private streaming server in school.

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