Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

In 1999 I was doing a road show with about twenty laptops. I would roll into town, setup and do a workshop for tech coordinators. The topics varied widely. I carried a case of CDs with Ghost images. The morning of the workshop I would re-image all the machines for that day’s workshop. The night before this particular workshop one of my kids got into one of my cases and took out the CD holder with all my images. I had no idea this had happened until I was about 100 miles from my house and my cell phone rang.

At this point I could either turn around and go back home or I could figure out a way to get a 600MB file to where I was going. Fortunately I had a cable modem at home. I talked someone through the process of placing the CD into a computer, connecting to an FTP server and starting the upload of the image. Two hours later, when I arrived at my destination, the upload was about half way finished. Once the big file was uploaded, I started the download. It didn’t take nearly as long to download the file. By bed time I had the image and tested it by pushing it out to a machine.

Knowing how to FTP saved me from spending an extra three hours in the car.

I teach a class where students learn to troubleshoot and do networking. It’s online. Each student has a computer at my office. The students never come to my office. Using remote control software (VNC), each student demonstrates software installation and troubleshooting skills. At the end of the semester I give them a chance to do some bonus work. One of the bonus problems is The Big File. I zip up 700MB of files into a zip file and place it on a server in my office. The goal for the student is to get that file from the server to a home or school computer.

There are a couple of things that make this problem difficult. The server is behind a firewall. No ports are open to the server. A share on the server gives the students Read access to the folder with the big file. The student PC is available only through the VNC port. The VNC computer can get out to the Internet.

It is interesting to watch all the different methods that are used to try and move that file. The instructions clearly state that emailing the file to a school email server is something that should first be approved by the email server administrator. There’s nothing like a 700MB file attachment to clog an email server.

With all the free services out there, I have seen the bonus accomplished dozens of different ways. I have also seen students break the big file into 700 little files and email them one at a time.

For the record… the most efficient way to do this one is to use Hamachi. This creates a virtual VPN. From there you can map a drive from the VNC computer right to your home computer. Drag. Drop. (Wait a few hours.) Done.

The University of Findlay houses the Mazza Museum which is the first and largest museum of original picture book art. The art of picture books is normally created to be photographed for a book. Once copies of the original art are made, many pieces end up at the Mazza.

There are school buses full of kids that visit the museum almost every day. The students can walk through the museum and see the original art hanging above a copy of the published book. No matter what your age, they have artwork from a book you read as a child or read to your own child.

When the United States Postal Service decided to release a series of stamps with picture book art, they came to Mazza for the release.

Many famous authors and artists come to Mazza each year for special events. Today Gail Gibbons was the guest artist. She writes and illustrates picture books. Her specialty is non-fiction for grades kindergarten through three. She goes to extra lengths to make sure her content is accurate. If she writes about an animal, she researches everything about the animal. By doing this, her readers learn content that is correct.

She is not a technophile. It was obvious to the older people in the crowd as she pulled out a carousel of 35mm slides. She had no PowerPoint presentation. Everything was done the old fashioned way with a slide projector.

She said one thing that stuck with me. When she first started writing picture books, she visited the library to find out more information about her selected book topics. She said she was amazed at the number of books in the library with inaccurate information. Because of this she always checks multiple resources to make sure the information she writes in her books is accurate.

This goes back to my post about Wikipedia. We need to learn to hone this skill in our students. Getting information is easy. Determining which information is valuable is priceless.