Here’s an article from the Mitiri group, sponsored by Cisco.
It’s an interesting read showing some real research into the effective use of different technologies in improving student learning. As you read through the article, you’ll notice that some of the areas (they point them out) still don’t have rigorous research showing if technology is helping or not.
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I was looking for a short video clip for one of my classes when I stumbled across this link.
http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html
It looks like Berkeley is using Google Video to post lectures from courses offered on campus. The production quality isn’t great, but it captures most of what is seen in a classroom. This particular effort involves at least one person running a video camera for the instructor. It looks like multiple channels are being captured for some of the lectures as the video of the presenter is switched with the presenter’s computer screen at different times.
Producing these would take a little work, but it’s nothing outside the capabilities of a technology student. In fact, this would be great experience for a teacher candidate interested in technology integration in the classroom. Digitizing video and editing that video into something that could be used online is a valuable skill. The downside to online video has always been the limit of bandwidth in a school district. Most districts have one T1 for several buildings. Adding video streaming to the normal traffic sometimes just doesn’t work well. But having a resource like Google Videos is great. At no cost to the school (money or bandwidth), the district can have video streaming of content created by teachers.
Now we just need to make sure the school’s filter doesn’t block Google Video.
At the beginning of the school year, the entire College of Education moved into a new building. We share the building with other departments. Our building is large with more than a dozen classrooms. We actually have more classrooms that we can fill each hour. As a result, we have a lot of students from other departments taking classes in our building.
Within our college we have always tried to have an open door policy. Any time I am in the office, I just leave my door open. This way, if someone stops by to see me, he/she will know I am in the building even if I am not in office. With all the students roaming our building, we have had a few security problems. On several occasions, faculty have come back to the office to find a student trying to use the faculty computer to print a paper for a class. Of course, most faculty keep things like student data (grades) and other private information on the office computer.
Most of our faculty have not had a reason to worry about computer security before now. Some have used the auto-login feature of the OS to avoid the hassles of typing a password every time the computer turns on. Also, few have used a screen saver with a password. We are now instituting these practices. Here are a couple of tips to help secure your PC, whether using XP of OS X.
If you are using OS X, here is a MacWorld article with several ways of quickly locking a computer: Quickly Lock Your Screen.
If you are using XP there are a couple of ways to quickly lock the computer. Pressing CTRL-ALT-Delete (all at the same time) will bring up the Windows security screen. One of the buttons will say Lock Computer. Pressing that button will do it. An even quicker way of locking the computer is to use the keyboard short-cut: Windows-L. Press and hold the Windows Logo key and the L key.
An extra safety measure that should always be used is a screen saver with a password. This is recommended because you want your computer to automatically lock if it has not been used for a period of time. You may not always remember to lock your computer when you leave the room, especially if you are not using the computer when you leave the area.
For more than ten years, the most popular web server has been Apache. According to Netcraft, Apache has more than twice the market share of the next most popular web server IIS. For dynamic content, Apache with MySQL and PHP are the most popular combination. MySQL is the database server and PHP is the scripting language. Of course, putting all this on a Linux server gives rise to LAMP — Linux – Apache – MySQL – PHP. You can do the similar things with IIS on a Windows server using ASP (scripting language) and MS SQL (database server), but MS SQL is not free. More importantly, most free packages, things like WordPress, Moodle and Mambo are all based on PHP with MySQL as the database server. With great pain I installed PHP and MySQL on a Windows 2003 Server running IIS. WordPress installed quite easily, but Moodle wouldn’t get past the first screen. I would venture to say most home computer users couldn’t make the IIS - MySQL - PHP combination work. There are just too many things that have to be manually configured. I went through the trouble because I already have IIS on my web server and I have thousands of custom pages using ASP. I can’t easily convert all that to Apache. Besides, my employer uses IIS and all my projects usually end up on those servers.
But I know a lot of people that would like to setup a web server and use some of the freely available packages on an internal web server. Almost all of these people have a computer with Windows XP. Here is a way to do this in about fifteen minutes.
Apache2Triad (A2T)
This installation package will install (on a Windows XP machine) everything needed to run PHP applications on an Apache server with MySQL as the database engine. In addition, it will install Perl, Python, PGSQL, OpenSSL, Xmail and SlimFTPD. The web server will serve up all your HTML files without any configuration after installation. If you wish to customize the installation, that can be accomplished through a slick web-based Control Panel (pictured at top of post). All is available through a browser at
http://localhost/apache2triadcp
I downloaded Apache2Triad and installed it on one of my old machines. I used all the defaults and the entire process was finished in less than fifteen minutes. I then downloaded WordPress. WordPress is easy to install once you have the server, database and scripting all setup. The first step is manually creating a database. Fortunately the A2T package includes PHPMySQL. This is a set of PHP scripts that is be used to manage a MySQL server through a web browser. I went to
and was prompted for a username and password. During the A2T installation a username (root) and password (determined by installer) were created. I enter those and got the PHPMyAdmin configuration panel.
I typed in a database name and press the Create button. That’s done.
I then extracted the downloaded WordPress files into
C:\apache2triad\htdocs\wordpress
HTDOCS is the web folder created by A2T. This is the folder where all my web server’s pages will reside. All the WordPress files will be in a folder under the HTDOCS folder. The installation is web-based. Browser to
This walked me through the installation. In less than two minutes, I had WordPress installed. It was just that easy.
If you are a novice at setting up servers and are thinking of experimenting with a web server on your Windows based computer, I highly recommend Apache2Triad. It is easy to install and includes a lot of bells and whistles.