NixIT Teaching Technology

Owairaka District School's Redesign

I’ve been working with Owairaka since 2003. It’s a great community who are rightfully proud of what their school has to offer. The school is supported by a parent community who come from a wide range of backgrounds. The school reflects the community that it comes from.

Redesigning this website was a real challenge. Everyone had something to contribute and the challenge was to be able to accomodate every opinion. I think we did.

The website has:

rotating images in the header. This is a flash header designed so that the school can change the images when they feel like it.
a vertical fly out menu. The menu structure recognises things that are important to the whole learning community.
strong use of the school colours. The blue and yellow in the header, footer and menu are the school’s branding.
an Enviroschools focus. Owairaka District School is a Silver Enviroschool. The whole community recognises the importance of maintaining a clean footprint on the planet.
useful links for the community. Parents and caregivers can access the school office, school newsletters and see what is happening via the embedded Google calendar.
lots of photographs of the students and the school environment. This is a website that reflects what is happening on a day to day basis.

http://www.owairaka.school.nz

St Pauls School

St Pauls School is a Catholic integrated school in Massey, West Auckland.

The school is supported by a strong community and wanted to be able to share what was happening with community members. Teachers are able to edit their own classroom pages and add updated content and pictures easily.

http://www.stpaulsprimary.school.nz/

Networking Chaos

It came as a huge shock to realise that that the internet could be an important tool for learning. Classrooms were not designed for electrical equipment or for the plethora of gadgets that we now rely on every day. Twenty-first century learning environments require twenty-first century electrical and data networks.

The Ministry of Education has set out clear standards for schools that are constructing new buildings or refitting existing classrooms or learning spaces. They have approved suppliers for switches and other network gear and clear guidelines for cabling and for contractors who complete the work.

Cabling and switching standards can be found on this page. More information can be found here.

Plain English translation of the standards can be found here, at NixIT Teaching Technology.

Image from here.

Conficker - April Fool's Day Joke?

April Fool’s Day joke or a serious threat to your computer? At the moment no one really knows whether the Conficker worm is a serious threat to the world’s computer networks or a sick joke.

The Conficker worm has been around for a little while and its designers (the bad guys) have developed several versions. The good guys (is there such a thing?) have tried to reverse engineer the code and discovered some of the features that could make it a serious threat.

Thanks in part to a quarter-million-dollar bounty on the head of the writer of the worm, offered by Microsoft, security researchers are aggressively digging into the worm’s code as they attempt to engineer a cure or find the writer before the deadline. What’s known so far is that on April 1, all infected computers will come under the control of a master machine located somewhere across the web, at which point anything’s possible. Will the zombie machines become denial of service attack pawns, steal personal information, wipe hard drives, or simply manifest more traditional malware pop-ups and extortion-like come-ons designed to sell you phony security software? No one knows.Â (Yahoo!Tech)

Some sources are saying that home computers are at a lesser risk than network machines because home users have firewalls and sit behind hardware routers. In theory this is true but in practice home users often disable their firewalls in order to use P2P networks and torrent services. Home users often have small networks which are shared with laptops and other mobile devices. And, the Conficker variants are often shared via the humble USB key – which we all happily insert into any computer going.

Good news though! Computer worms, trojans and viruses are nothing new – and neither is the method of protection. Here is my list of ways to protect your Windows computers from nasties.

1. Microsoft Windows Update is your friend – head over to Windows update and install everything that it says that you need. This particular security issue was identified last year so an up to date machine is at a lower risk

2. Antivirus products help scan incoming data, assess for virus threats and alert you to their dangers- make sure that yours is up to date and running (Conficker can disable AV products)

3. Antispyware products identify trojans and worms and help protect against the threats that they represent – again update and scan

4. Your firewall is there to serve a purpose – don’t disable it – and don’t believe your kids when they say that everyone uses Limewire, etc to get files …

Still worried?

Microsoft offer a free online scanning service (you must use Internet Explorer to access it). Trend Micro offer the same service as do Panda Security.

For the geeks – who are comfortable editting the registry – disable USB autorun

and …

Previously

OSX Leopard – Making the big cat purr

Learning@School presentation by Stuart Hale.

Tips and Tricks.

Use “About this Mac”, “More info” to check if your USB key / Firewire drive is being recognised by by your system.

Using the little ball on the mouse and the control key to zoom in and out. Use two fingers on the scroll pad on your MacBook to do the same

Version Tracker: http://versiontracker.com to keep your Mac up to date.

- go to Version Tracker and search for Monolingual. Install, and it will retrieve 5-6 GB space

- be careful not to remove the versions of English that you need – NZ English, US English, UK English …

Macs and viruses. Need to fix permissions … Open your hard drive, Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility, First Aid … Repair Permissions … will check the rights etc. Complete this monthly.

Apple manuals can be found at http://support.apple.com/manuals/#

Stacks. Downloads Folder on the dock. Drag folders to the right hand side of the dock to get spring loaded effect – keep an eye on the latest docs, etc. Really large folders don’t spring but pop open.

KidPix – for better real human voice use Alex. Even comes with pauses for breath.

OSX 10 – Macrons – System Preferences, International, Input, Input Menu … select “Show input menu in menu bar” … Tick Maori. Then you can click on the flag to be able to select a different language selection. Open WP doc (Pages) and use the option key to add a macron to a vowel.

<<Please use the software that the MoE pay for and supply – nice advertising moment here Stuart – hehe >>

Use the list view, options to calculate and find large, small files. Use column view to maintain viewpoint. Use Coverflow (iTunes look) to find stuff by what it looks like inside. Preview on steroids? Use the spacebar to get a quick look.

Use Spotlight to find lost files. Hint to get don instead of don’t, doncaster … write don – leave a space after the word.

Picture Credits: http://flickr.com/photos/erica_marshall/2938981327/ under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ licence

Owairaka District School

Owairaka District School is situated in multicultural Mt Albert. The school is proud of its ability to serve the needs of the local community.

The website features a rotating header image. It is full width with two sidebars enabling the school to show off a lot of content tidily.

The site has a Google Calendar, an image gallery and links to classroom blogs. Future plans include offering more multimedia content.

http://www.owairaka.school.nz/

Hooked on Thinking

The Hooked on Thinking website brings together a number of read/write (Web2.0) tools. Educational consultants Pam Hook and Julie Mills showcase their work and share many resources.

This site integrates a Google Calendar, Wikispace wiki, onsite Dokuwiki and a Twitter stream. These sub-sites are branded with similar colour schemes and the Hooked on Thinking logo.

Julie and Pam use a fully featured image gallery to serve up images and slide shows.

http://hooked-on-thinking.com/

Wainui Primary School

Wainui Primary School is a country school situated just moments away from the city. The school has its own stand of native bush and has a long tradition of learning from its own environment.

The school site is very clean and has a very simple navigation: home, past, present and future. Inside this structure visitors can find out about the school’s rich history, what’s happening today as well as look at future learning ideas.

http://wainui.school.nz

Who owns your network?

I have to be really careful here. During my work week I exchange hats on a regular basis. Some of the time I am teacher who wants access now … and then I am technician with lofty views about security … and then I am subverter – I want to get to XXX.co.nz because … I want to …

So who does own your school network? I thought about this question last week when a cluster school couldn’t access a Wikispace or a Zoho Creator database. Their inability to access these sites was only half of the problem though. They had to contact an external technican to have the sites removed from the filtering list.

The network is more than just the internet connection though. It’s also the school’s intranet and it’s also the individual computers and other gear. So who “owns” all of this? And what about the school’s website? Who does it all belong to?

I found this page of Ten Commandments from the Rotorua Education Centre and thought about the networks that I own / manage / work in / attempt to work in. It’s a fairly decent look at what expections a school IT person might have. It also looks at the expectations that a teacher might have about their school laptop. The problem is that the page misses out the other side of the issue. If you are going to use the network you need to be aware of the importance of looking after it. That means being sensitive about passwords and shared network spaces. It means being thoughtful about where you put your 13Gb video file (it’s true – I saw one on a server last week) and it means understanding about quotas (I saw a whole school network brought to a standstill last year when someone tried to synchronise 4Gb of photos and movies over a wireless connection because her son said she should!).

So what’s the answer? I think we need to stop thinking about school laptops and computers in terms of home machines. While they are similar beasts their function puts them in a different cage altogether. I think we need to look at using technicians with an educational background (easier said than done) and we need to think about giving more information to the very people who the network matters most to – the end user.

With this in mind, here’s a brilliant site to download a movie that could just help older kids and teachers understand a little bit more about the connected part of the network. Warriors of the Net is a few years old now (1999) but it does explain a bit about networks and how information is transported around the building and around the world.

Birkdale Primary School

Birkdale Primary School’s website has a very clean template. The content is divided into several major areas which are accessed with a sliding menu.

The site also features an Interact content management system for parent and community interaction and a Zenphoto gallery.

http://birkdaleprimary.school.nz