google – Page 4 – John McLear

An unpopular blog post – 7 ways to cut ICT costs

Posted on July 4, 2010July 4, 2010 by John McLear

It is never popular talking about how schools can save money on ICT or areas where spending is just too high. Sorry if you fall out with me on this one.. These are all suggestions, I don’t endorse any in any way, shape or form (this is mostly for political reasons…).

For the most part you get what you pay for, so any savings may mean a drop in quality and a negative impact on teaching and learning. The conservative education policy is (we assume) run by people with more knowledge than myself so when they say schools need to spend less on ICT all I do is figure out how..

It is up to you to decide how they will impact your teaching and learning.

1. Printing

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500

Yep, the ugly ink spewing beast is still costing even the smallest of primary school thousands of pounds every year mostly in toners and ink. So how can a school save money?

a) Use a managed printing solution to reduce the cost per sheet and to restrict the amount certain users can print.

b) Use on-line collaboration such as email more effectively

c) Encourage parents to get on-line and use an e-newsletter / social networking

2. MIS support

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £2000

Why is it that one application costs nearly as much to support as the entire network full of applications used on the curriculum side?

a) Change your support provider to a more cost effective option

b) Use e-registration and remove the need to replace that nasty OMR

3. Internet connectivity

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £2000

Internet provision from Becta approved providers usually costs 2 to 4 times that from a local internet provider, this is because they usually bundle educational services into the package and/or tools to collaborative with other schools in your area.

a) Change to a local internet provider offering less bandwidth at reduced rates

4. Backups

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £250

Tape backups are horribly inefficient, unreliable and costly.

a) Use remote backup services

5. AV

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500

Most schools have now spent up on purchasing interactive classroom stuff, replacement bulbs can cost up to £500 each

a) Maintain your projects by pro actively cleaning filters and performing regular maintenance

6. Software Licensing

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500

Microsoft have now released their Office web apps so when you come to purchase new devices you can almost ignore the cost of Microsoft Office licensing.

a) Get familiar with Live @ Edu & Office Web Apps or Google Web Apps

b) Become familiar with the vast array of free web 2 tools for schools

7. Technical support

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500

From personal experience I know a major cost of technical support is the time spent visiting a specific machine. There are obvious advantages to having an on-site engineer. Face to face support is still by far the best we have right now but that is because we haven’t really explored the realm of good remote desktop support for our curriculum networks as of yet.

a) Encourage your technical support provider to explore on-demand live remote desktop support and monitoring

‘Dark age’ fears (news.bbc.co.uk)
Curtains for Becta (mclear.co.uk)

Android install APK

Posted on June 28, 2010July 6, 2010 by John McLear

So you are beta testing an application or whatever and you have been given an .apk file to install.

Before we start make sure you have the android device driver installed, if not you can download it here.

1. Plug the phone in to your PC with a USB Cable. When prompted DO NOT mount USB.

2. On the phone goto Settings –> Applications then click the Unknown sources tick box.

3. On your PC Download the Android SDK

4. Extract the Android SDK to c:\androidsdk

5. Copy the .apk file you were given to c:\androidsdk\tools

6. Click Start –> Run then type in:

c:\androidsdk\tools\adb install -r c:\androidsdk\tools\whatever.apk

Make sure you replace whatever.apk with the name of the file you copied.

7. Your application should now be installed. Visit the application menu on the Android device and look for your icon.

Lesson Not Learned: AT&T locks down the HTC Aria’s app selection (mobilecrunch.com)
Install Android packages directly from GitHub (github.com)
HTC Aria Rooted Two Days After Release, Instructions Are Live (androidpolice.com)

Ye Olde Android adventure – Day 2

Posted on June 15, 2010October 30, 2011 by primaryt

Today as I ventured towards Droidville I met a sage who reminded me about some useful keystokes.

Eclipse: Control Alt Down duplicates line
Emulator: Rotate screen – Control F11

As I moved closer to Droidville the air began to fill with hope, thousands of hopeful children and teachers poored into the streets, so I quickly hid and jumped into Bar Youtube (Part of the Starbucks chain) and watched another video to further my understanding of the power of Android, another good one this time by Ye old O’Reilly

Building my team to fight the forces of evil

I got in touch with a developer through rent-a-coder called Kumar Bibek who has 3 years experience fighting the forces of evil (developing Android apps). We had a conversation that went something line: “I can make the bow, can ye make the arrow?” We agree’d on 100$ for the array (final bits of the work that were out of my skill set).

Overview of the bits I’m doing:
Making Classdroid look fit for a princess (Layout design/User interfaces)
Making Classdroid easy to use (Application flow)
Making Classdroid link together (Intent assignments)
Designing how Classdroid will save our princesses minions (Database design)

Overview of the bits he’s doing:
Not shooting the messenger (Code to read/write preferences/settings to/from SQLite)
Carrier Pigeon nurturing (Control method for post to WordPress)
Controlling the Eye of Gondor (Camera SDK modifications)

In the Sage’s library I found a piece of parchment with some notes scribbled on it:
Resource = text,pictures, sound objects, layout….
Intent = change the page
View = new page layout/display
\n = newline when using text elements

Very cryptic clues, maybe I will need them to enter the great hall of Droidville?

It’s been a long day…..

As the day drew to a close and the Sun nestled the hills of Azrowilsden I discovered WordPress have an android application that does 80% of what I want to do from a control point of view so I’m going to hack into that to save me needing to write the function that posts the RPC over XML to WordPress. This is why the world should embrace more open source, it empowers us all instead of dumbing us down like iLem users who are too scared to google how to create an android application (or don’t see it being a valuable use of their time).

As the iLem users fall off their platform I am gently warmed inside by the knowledge that we are creating a better, more open world without any corporate borders. One application at a time.

WordPress iPhone App Dethroned By WordPress For Android? (Video Uploading) (blogherald.com)
The Android fanboys are here (ipadreport.blogspot.com)
iPhone vs. Android Showdown: Which Phone Is Best for Power Users? (lifehacker.com)

Ye Olde Android adventure – Day 1

Posted on June 15, 2010June 15, 2010 by John McLear

Today I started on my journey towards Droidville, past the gargoyles of SDKs and into the realm of eclipse. I began my journey equiping myself with the finest weapons possible in the form of eclipse and android sdk including all the power ups and runes. I stopped for lunch at bar youtube where I indulged in an excellent documentary and began my developing whilst following the gentle, slightly distant voice of the presenter. “Whisper control shift oh! to the sage and ye be blessed with organized imports” I heard him mutter under his breath..

Hours went by and the youtube video was stopped, rewound and replayed various times, as the sun set I had my Hello world working and some UIs designed, unfortunatly my Hello World app is called com.golf.. The icon is set. If this is groundhog day let it end…

Flute playing and shots of rolling hills come into screen..

Will tomorrow bring safer travels for our hero?

Making a Google Teacher Academy Application is easy

Posted on June 13, 2010June 20, 2010 by primaryt

Making my Google Teacher Academy Application video only took about 30 minutes. The thing that took the longest was deciding what I was going to talk about. My recommendation to you is just to talk about something you are passionate about and not to try to think about what other people would want to hear. If you are thinking about applying I strongly recommend you put a little time aside to create a presentation because when you do it will make you think ab0ut a) what you are passionate about and b) it will make it easier for people to understand what you are passionate about. This was an unexpected outcome from doing my video and it has proved to be massively useful.

How I picked my topic

Initially I was going to do a high and mighty review about using ICT in an innovative way in the classroom, this just seemed too vague with a whitewash of buzz words and sales schpeil. I decided to do a presentation on something I think could affect education in the future and is slightly fringe and creative. Admittedly I spent hours looking at the brief by Google dissecting it and thinking about how I could make the perfect presentation. Ultimately I figured presenting something I am passionate about would come across better. I wrote my script and saved that to PrimaryPad, a few people jumped onto the Pad and modified all the incoherent bits so I was using simple language in my presentation.

Creating the presentation

I used Microsoft Powerpoint to create the presentation slides, I wanted to keep things simple and as text free as possible. All of the images I used were Creative Commons and found through various creative commons image search websites such as flickr.

Recording the video and audio

I used a flip video camera to record the video and a Samson USB microphone. I put the flip video camera on a box and stood in front of a white wall. I recorded the video through the day to make sure there was some natural lighting.

Making the video

I exported each of the slides from Powerpoint to a .PNG file and then imported those files into Camtasia Studio. I dragged the video and audio that I recorded on the flip camera and the Samsun microphone into Camtasia Studio. Once I had the audio, video and slides into the program I synced up the audio, chopped out all my out takes(about 80% of the content was useless) then and added a few transitions. I normalized the audio and shrunk the video from the camera into a corner. Finally I added a few transitions then exported the project to WMV which I then uploaded to Youtube.

Tools used: