When the iPad was announced, students and teachers in the school were asking me would I get one and my standard answer was "probably ........ but I'm not sure why"
I was having dinner with a past pupil a few weeks ago and he told me he was heading to the states so I asked him to do some shopping on my behalf. So here I sit blogging on an iPad. Still not sure why I have bought it other than a bit of self indulgence but I have no regrets, it is a very cool device.
I remember when the first iPhone came out there were only an handful of applications and no app store. It was a very limited device compared to the current iPhone and the growing range of Android devices snapping at Apple heels. This new iPad has a similar feel about it and I expect it will only get better as new versions are developed.
For example I only seem to be able to put in plain text for this piece as the toolbars I normally have available don't work on an iPad. One I really want as well is to be able to edit Google Docs but the interface on the iPad is the same as for the iPhone. On a device this size and this powerful it seems silly that I can't edit Google Docs. I have played with Pages and it is very good indeed. It would be nice to have a common file system for the various applications but I can live with that limitation for now and I'll email stuff to myself as needed so I can print etc. I'm not a big fan of flash but there is a lot of it out there and I'd prefer to be able to access it. Perhaps we will need to wait for Android tablets to get these kind of things.
I installed a nice application for writing code but it has the problem that getting code off the iPad and onto the server. I normally download a file, make changes and then put it back. The iPad doesn't really allow for moving files on and off easily. The application I installed takes a rather extraordinary step of installing a webserver on the iPad. To get files on or off the iPad for this app I have to go to another computer, fire up a web browser, put in the address of the web server running on the iPad which then allows me to download files from or upload files to the iPad. Much too convoluted for regular use.
I had a look at a couple of FTP applications but ran into a similar problem. I would be able to get files off the server to the iPad and vice versa with little problem but I can't then edit the files with the applications I would like to use. One FTP program did include a basic editor which might do and I'll check it out again to see if it will meet my needs.
Einstein once asked a student to write slowly on the board as he was a slow thinker. I'm no Einstein but I share the sentiment when it comes to typing. I'm not a very fast typist but that's ok as I don't think all that fast. I find though that I can type on the iPad about as fast as I normally type. I had thought I'd want to get the external keyboard but I'm not sure now I'll have a need for it.
The apps that work well on the iPhone are even better on the iPad. Things like VNC, email, web browsing, Stanza, Twitter etc. are nothing short of georgeous. Downloaded the Kindle app and bought a book and it seems promising too. YouTube and films look terrific. The iPad is in its element when you are consuming content rather than trying to create it.
Nonetheless a promising start and I'm looking forward to iOS 4 when it comes out. Most of all I hope the army of app developers find better ways to cope with the limitations Apple enforce.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
1000 ip Addresses?
The first network I setup and managed in my school was back in 1998 and consisted of 24 Windows 98 desktops with an NT4 server and backup server, all in one room with one computer linked to the internet. With over 200 machines on the network now I look back and wonder what on earth I used to do with my time when there were only 24.
I was over in Prague at Easter for an Apple education conference. I'd never been to Prague before and was glad of the opportunity to escape Ireland for a while and wind down a bit far from home. I reckon I'll see Prague again before too long as it is a beautiful city. I took a few photos and short video clips on an iPhone and stuck them together below.
Having time to reflect and chat with folk involved in ICT integration in other schools I had time to think about what trends I need to start planning for so I can start to support them as they emerge in my school. Nothing very unexpected really, a lot more mobile devices for the most part. Over the last couple of months we have reorganised the structure of the network a bit to allow for a lot more ip addresses to be dished out to students and staff as they are needed. I had been prompted to do this as we were running into a problem where we were running out of addresses and room for expansion was limited.
On the "more mobile devices" front I had been thinking along the lines of increased numbers of laptops and phones. I figured there might be a place for netbooks with their long battery life and handy size. I don't altogether buy Steve Jobs line that netbooks have no future as they "aren't better at anything".
However I don't see netbooks as laptop replacements for students. They do get some things right especially portability and battery life. While lighter laptops with better battery life are becoming available and will no doubt get lighter and better I don't think they are a particularly good technology for students to be taking from class to class. Battery life is still very much an issue and there are few laptops that will go for a full school day on one charge and with only a couple of sockets per classroom we can't support them. I'm thinking from a second level perspective where students move from class to class every 40 minutes. On the other side though I reckon a laptop is better for long periods of use if for no other reason than the size of the screen.
Nothing new in the above argument and I have been discussing this off and on with other teachers for nigh on two years since the 7" Asus came out. In the last couple of years netbooks have moved to bigger screens and faster processors so that there isn't much to choose between a low end laptop and a high end netbook other than the absence of a CD/DVD drive.
I have watched with interest what Apple might do in response to the growth of the netbook segment of the market but was taken aback when they announced the iPad which seemed to be just a big iPod touch. When asked would I be buying one I said I probably would but that I wasn't altogether sure why I would. Having read the reviews and thought about it a bit more I think the iPad will have a place in education but like the laptop, netbook and other mobile devices it won't cover all bases. I also see it as very much a version 1. I think the absence of a camera is the biggest omission for now. The absence of Flash support I can understand but it will be sorely missed in the classroom with the web content that is out there now. I wouldn't be surprised to see the camera appear in version 2 but it looks like Apple are hell bent on no Flash support. Lots of scope though for applications in education. Check out the periodic table of elements, iPad style ....
Of course there are other options coming on stream too. We are seeing quite a few Google Android based tablet devices appearing on the market http://www.androidtablets.net/ and no doubt Chrome OS ones will follow before too long. These will support flash and will offer a more complete Internet experience I expect. However I don't expect they will get the kind of developer support that Apple have managed to get out of the gate but in time they may well catch up.
And Microsoft? They seem to have two possibilities at the moment. They are offering Windows 7 as the all singing, all dancing one size fits all OS. The HP iSlate is likely to be the lead product but I have my doubts about how useful it will be. From what I can see it will be a tablet laptop with no keyboard. One of the things that Apple have done with the iPod, iPhone and now iPad is develop a very easy to use, intuitive touch screen operating system. All the applications developed for iPhone OS work on that basis. Windows 7 though is a desktop/laptop operating system which will support touch screen technology. The vast majority of applications available for Windows 7 assume you will be using a keyboard and mouse/trackpad. I don't expect Microsoft will attract the level of Windows 7 development in the area of touch screen applications that Apple and Google will attract for their offerings. In the absence of a development community churning out applications I can see the iSlate having the drawbacks of a netbook without the advantages of a laptop that Windows 7 will support much better. Couple that with a smaller screen, lower resolution and half the battery life I don't think Apple or Google will lose sleep over the iSlate. Time will tell. One feature that Microsoft have that others don't do well is the use of a stylus. Writing and drawing diagrams is a lot easier with a stylus than with a finger. I could see there being interest in a 14" version of a HP iSlate in education circles but the trend with Windows tablets is towards smaller screens and the biggest tablet HP do now is 12". I know teachers with tablet laptops who are hanging on to their old ones just for the screen size.
The other path that Microsoft might choose is the Courier that was leaked to the Internet about 6 months ago - http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet . As touch screen technology goes this is as good as anything I have seen and it has caused a fair bit of excitement among teachers I have discussed it with. Unfortunately all we have seen so far is the concept animations with no definite information of when or indeed if it will be developed commercially. Not as flexible or powerful as Windows 7 but better suited to a smaller touchscreen device. One to watch out for.
So where are we heading? I don't think there will be a single device that will meet all our classroom needs. I don't think students having laptops for use in every class is a particularly useful or sustainable model in the exam driven education system we work in at the moment. I think we are indeed going to see a plethora of mobile devices coming on the market that will find a place in our classrooms of which the iPad looks the most interesting at the moment.
From a network point of view all these devices may well need IP addresses as it is easy to see they will all have use for internet access of some sort. So if every student has some combination of phone, laptop and some other tablet device then you may need to be able to have 2-3 IP addresses per student and teacher in your school. There are a number of teachers in my school already using 2 IP addresses (laptop & phone). Being a boarding school we are already seeing a lot of devices using IP addresses including laptops, phones, Nintendo and Sony handheld gaming devices, iPods etc. I expect this to increase significantly in the next few months as we have recently made internet access available to students via wireless access points throughout most of the classroom and recreation areas of the school. When Abeline University http://www.acu.edu/news/2008/080225_iphone.html introduced their iPod/iPhone per student policy they had to hugely increase the number of access points they provided. Now in a second level school we aren't going to need to provide Internet access to 200 students in one room very often, if ever. However at the moment I am getting away with 1 wireless access point for every 3 classrooms. I'll need to consider increasing the number of access points, not to increase the areas covered but to increase the bandwidth to areas already covered. So I am expecting to be using circa 500 IP addresses next September and have plans in place to support twice that number.
All this planning assumes of course that the school will be providing internet access either through our own lines or through the NCTE/HEAnet line. How long will it be I wonder before everyone will be subscribed to their own internet access independent of the school network. Already we are seeing students here with 3G dongles like this one from 3. Unrestricted access to the Internet is not something we are keen on in my school for all the obvious reasons but as the cost comes down I'm not sure how we can easily turn the tide on this trend. Fun fun fun.
So interesting times ahead on the mobile front and I'm looking forward to seeing the various models of tablet devices finding their niche in the school and just how many IP addresses we are dishing out on the network.
I was over in Prague at Easter for an Apple education conference. I'd never been to Prague before and was glad of the opportunity to escape Ireland for a while and wind down a bit far from home. I reckon I'll see Prague again before too long as it is a beautiful city. I took a few photos and short video clips on an iPhone and stuck them together below.
Having time to reflect and chat with folk involved in ICT integration in other schools I had time to think about what trends I need to start planning for so I can start to support them as they emerge in my school. Nothing very unexpected really, a lot more mobile devices for the most part. Over the last couple of months we have reorganised the structure of the network a bit to allow for a lot more ip addresses to be dished out to students and staff as they are needed. I had been prompted to do this as we were running into a problem where we were running out of addresses and room for expansion was limited.
On the "more mobile devices" front I had been thinking along the lines of increased numbers of laptops and phones. I figured there might be a place for netbooks with their long battery life and handy size. I don't altogether buy Steve Jobs line that netbooks have no future as they "aren't better at anything".
However I don't see netbooks as laptop replacements for students. They do get some things right especially portability and battery life. While lighter laptops with better battery life are becoming available and will no doubt get lighter and better I don't think they are a particularly good technology for students to be taking from class to class. Battery life is still very much an issue and there are few laptops that will go for a full school day on one charge and with only a couple of sockets per classroom we can't support them. I'm thinking from a second level perspective where students move from class to class every 40 minutes. On the other side though I reckon a laptop is better for long periods of use if for no other reason than the size of the screen.
Nothing new in the above argument and I have been discussing this off and on with other teachers for nigh on two years since the 7" Asus came out. In the last couple of years netbooks have moved to bigger screens and faster processors so that there isn't much to choose between a low end laptop and a high end netbook other than the absence of a CD/DVD drive.
I have watched with interest what Apple might do in response to the growth of the netbook segment of the market but was taken aback when they announced the iPad which seemed to be just a big iPod touch. When asked would I be buying one I said I probably would but that I wasn't altogether sure why I would. Having read the reviews and thought about it a bit more I think the iPad will have a place in education but like the laptop, netbook and other mobile devices it won't cover all bases. I also see it as very much a version 1. I think the absence of a camera is the biggest omission for now. The absence of Flash support I can understand but it will be sorely missed in the classroom with the web content that is out there now. I wouldn't be surprised to see the camera appear in version 2 but it looks like Apple are hell bent on no Flash support. Lots of scope though for applications in education. Check out the periodic table of elements, iPad style ....
Of course there are other options coming on stream too. We are seeing quite a few Google Android based tablet devices appearing on the market http://www.androidtablets.net/ and no doubt Chrome OS ones will follow before too long. These will support flash and will offer a more complete Internet experience I expect. However I don't expect they will get the kind of developer support that Apple have managed to get out of the gate but in time they may well catch up.
And Microsoft? They seem to have two possibilities at the moment. They are offering Windows 7 as the all singing, all dancing one size fits all OS. The HP iSlate is likely to be the lead product but I have my doubts about how useful it will be. From what I can see it will be a tablet laptop with no keyboard. One of the things that Apple have done with the iPod, iPhone and now iPad is develop a very easy to use, intuitive touch screen operating system. All the applications developed for iPhone OS work on that basis. Windows 7 though is a desktop/laptop operating system which will support touch screen technology. The vast majority of applications available for Windows 7 assume you will be using a keyboard and mouse/trackpad. I don't expect Microsoft will attract the level of Windows 7 development in the area of touch screen applications that Apple and Google will attract for their offerings. In the absence of a development community churning out applications I can see the iSlate having the drawbacks of a netbook without the advantages of a laptop that Windows 7 will support much better. Couple that with a smaller screen, lower resolution and half the battery life I don't think Apple or Google will lose sleep over the iSlate. Time will tell. One feature that Microsoft have that others don't do well is the use of a stylus. Writing and drawing diagrams is a lot easier with a stylus than with a finger. I could see there being interest in a 14" version of a HP iSlate in education circles but the trend with Windows tablets is towards smaller screens and the biggest tablet HP do now is 12". I know teachers with tablet laptops who are hanging on to their old ones just for the screen size.
The other path that Microsoft might choose is the Courier that was leaked to the Internet about 6 months ago - http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet . As touch screen technology goes this is as good as anything I have seen and it has caused a fair bit of excitement among teachers I have discussed it with. Unfortunately all we have seen so far is the concept animations with no definite information of when or indeed if it will be developed commercially. Not as flexible or powerful as Windows 7 but better suited to a smaller touchscreen device. One to watch out for.
So where are we heading? I don't think there will be a single device that will meet all our classroom needs. I don't think students having laptops for use in every class is a particularly useful or sustainable model in the exam driven education system we work in at the moment. I think we are indeed going to see a plethora of mobile devices coming on the market that will find a place in our classrooms of which the iPad looks the most interesting at the moment.
So interesting times ahead on the mobile front and I'm looking forward to seeing the various models of tablet devices finding their niche in the school and just how many IP addresses we are dishing out on the network.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Making posters - Rasterbator & Picasa
Seaghan Moriarty demonstrated Rasterbator (careful how you say that in class) at the CESI conference a couple of years ago. It is an online application to generate posters from a photograph. Go to the website http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/ and click "Rasterbate Online" (stop sniggering). The site turns your photo into a pdf file of a series of rasterised pages you can print on a standard A4 printer. The pages form a jigsaw of your photograph that you can put together on a wall.
Another way to generate a poster is with Picasa. Picasa is a free tool from Google to manage and edit Photographs. It links with their photo album website service. There are lots of things you can do with Picasa and one I was playing with today is generating posters. The posters generated are basically enlargements of the original photograph so the quality will be higher than a rasterbated poster but will also use more ink.
Another way to generate a poster is with Picasa. Picasa is a free tool from Google to manage and edit Photographs. It links with their photo album website service. There are lots of things you can do with Picasa and one I was playing with today is generating posters. The posters generated are basically enlargements of the original photograph so the quality will be higher than a rasterbated poster but will also use more ink.
The screen capture videos for this were done with the new version of quicktime that comes with Snow Leopard. Pretty easy to use.
Update - Another online poster maker suggestion from Ban Ryan - http://www.blockposters.com/
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Catching Up
It has been a while since posting - I could use the excuse of the school holidays but of course holiday time is when I have more time not less so that won't do. When I started blogging, Patricia Donaghy recommended "little and often" but I haven't managed to follow that wise advice, perhaps it is time to give that maxim a whirl.
It was nice to get a mention on the Silicon Republic news site alongside Noel Cunningham et al
It has been a busy summer one way or another. Once the state exams were over and reports etc. were all sorted out in the school, my time was taken up getting myself organised for heading to Kenya with Camara - www.camara.ie. I have written a bit on this over on the CESI website in a DigiTeach article . I dare say I'll write about it here too over the next few months.
Looking forward to the CESI Meet later in September. It is good to see CESI giving folk a chance to meet up outside of the conference. Organisation for the conference will be kicking off soon as well and again more on that over the next few months.
The CESI mailing list is ticking along nicely with just over 390 members - should be 400 before too long. If there is wisdom in crowds then this crowd has a lot to offer those taking up the challenge of integrating ICT into education.
Despite my interest and fondness for all things Linux and Open Source I splashed out on a Macbook Pro for myself as I'm getting more interested in multimedia stuff, video editing etc. and well ..... Apple is very much the way to go for this in my experience and I'm glad to say it is a really great machine. I took a lot of video footage while in Kenya using a cheap Kodak Zi6. The quality was pretty good and it was so handy to carry around. I spent a lot of time recently playing with the footage and combining it with photographs taken by other Camara volunteers during our time in Kenya as well as some Kenyan music we got from the people we were working with over there. The workflow combination of iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes and iDVD make all of this so much easier to pull together than anything else I have played with on Linux or Windows. I found the Zi6 great and I plan on getting a Zi8 for the school when it is released in September.
That's all for now - time will tell if I go for the little and often maxim.
It was nice to get a mention on the Silicon Republic news site alongside Noel Cunningham et al
It has been a busy summer one way or another. Once the state exams were over and reports etc. were all sorted out in the school, my time was taken up getting myself organised for heading to Kenya with Camara - www.camara.ie. I have written a bit on this over on the CESI website in a DigiTeach article . I dare say I'll write about it here too over the next few months.Looking forward to the CESI Meet later in September. It is good to see CESI giving folk a chance to meet up outside of the conference. Organisation for the conference will be kicking off soon as well and again more on that over the next few months.
The CESI mailing list is ticking along nicely with just over 390 members - should be 400 before too long. If there is wisdom in crowds then this crowd has a lot to offer those taking up the challenge of integrating ICT into education.
Despite my interest and fondness for all things Linux and Open Source I splashed out on a Macbook Pro for myself as I'm getting more interested in multimedia stuff, video editing etc. and well ..... Apple is very much the way to go for this in my experience and I'm glad to say it is a really great machine. I took a lot of video footage while in Kenya using a cheap Kodak Zi6. The quality was pretty good and it was so handy to carry around. I spent a lot of time recently playing with the footage and combining it with photographs taken by other Camara volunteers during our time in Kenya as well as some Kenyan music we got from the people we were working with over there. The workflow combination of iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes and iDVD make all of this so much easier to pull together than anything else I have played with on Linux or Windows. I found the Zi6 great and I plan on getting a Zi8 for the school when it is released in September.That's all for now - time will tell if I go for the little and often maxim.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Playing with Virtualisation & Jing
After the ATI course last week I decided to bring one of the school Apple laptops with me to Portrush to play with. OS X is all well and good with its smooth & snazzy gui etc. but I found myself missing my Linux desktop for getting things done. Yep I could do pretty much everything through OS X but ....... well ..... I like Linux.
So time to try out virtualisation. Found a free application from Sun called Virtualbox , downloaded it and a beta ISO of the next version of Ubuntu and gave it a whirl. My verdict after playing for a couple of hours - It works really well. It should both run on Windows and run a Windows virtual machine and I'll try this out when I go home at the weekend. It has settings for running virtual machines for every version of Windows from 7, which is still in beta, back to 3.1. It does loads of other operating systems including BSD unix and Solaris. While Virtualbox runs fine on a Mac you can't create an OS X virtual machine as this is forbidden in the licence for OS X.
I wanted to show this in action and started checking out screen video capturing software. Jing seemed to work just fine so I coughed up $15 for the version that saves as a video file as well as SWF, which the free version does and am very impressed with it. There is a free one called RecordMyDesktop that runs on Linux but I couldn't find a good free one for OS X. The video below shows the Linux desktop booting up inside a window on an Apple laptop. Jing will record a voiceover as well but when I was using it for this one the fans on the laptop came on and it sounded like an airplane taking off. So I pulled the video into iMovie, deleted the audio track and did a voiceover instead with the fans turned off. An external microphone is probably the best way to go but I don't have one here with me. Then I loaded it up to Youtube and voila.
Not sure where the educational value of Virtualbox lies yet. I suppose we could run software designed for one platform on another one but not sure we have a use for that in my school. I reckon any techie students I work with will be interested in playing with it.
Something like Jing though, which runs on Windows as well, will be very useful. Rather than trying to demo everything live in class I can do the old Blue Peter trick of "Here's one I made earlier". It will also mean I can record a good demo and reuse it whenever needed or make it available to students to watch in their own time. Wink is a similar application for Windows that may be worth checking out. It can output in a variety of formats including PDF and SWF but not a video format so you can't upload to Youtube or the likes unless you convert it to a video format first.
So time to try out virtualisation. Found a free application from Sun called Virtualbox , downloaded it and a beta ISO of the next version of Ubuntu and gave it a whirl. My verdict after playing for a couple of hours - It works really well. It should both run on Windows and run a Windows virtual machine and I'll try this out when I go home at the weekend. It has settings for running virtual machines for every version of Windows from 7, which is still in beta, back to 3.1. It does loads of other operating systems including BSD unix and Solaris. While Virtualbox runs fine on a Mac you can't create an OS X virtual machine as this is forbidden in the licence for OS X.
I wanted to show this in action and started checking out screen video capturing software. Jing seemed to work just fine so I coughed up $15 for the version that saves as a video file as well as SWF, which the free version does and am very impressed with it. There is a free one called RecordMyDesktop that runs on Linux but I couldn't find a good free one for OS X. The video below shows the Linux desktop booting up inside a window on an Apple laptop. Jing will record a voiceover as well but when I was using it for this one the fans on the laptop came on and it sounded like an airplane taking off. So I pulled the video into iMovie, deleted the audio track and did a voiceover instead with the fans turned off. An external microphone is probably the best way to go but I don't have one here with me. Then I loaded it up to Youtube and voila.
Not sure where the educational value of Virtualbox lies yet. I suppose we could run software designed for one platform on another one but not sure we have a use for that in my school. I reckon any techie students I work with will be interested in playing with it.
Something like Jing though, which runs on Windows as well, will be very useful. Rather than trying to demo everything live in class I can do the old Blue Peter trick of "Here's one I made earlier". It will also mean I can record a good demo and reuse it whenever needed or make it available to students to watch in their own time. Wink is a similar application for Windows that may be worth checking out. It can output in a variety of formats including PDF and SWF but not a video format so you can't upload to Youtube or the likes unless you convert it to a video format first.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
OS X vs Windows Vs Linux - Part 2
The current computer room in Clongowes doubles up as a study where students can work during specified study times in the evening. It caters mainly for Transition year students who have access to computers most evenings during study. Students from other year groups can get permission from whoever is supervising their study to visit the computer room for a while to perform some specific task. The old computer room was Windows only but when we moved to a bigger room I had more scope for flexability. I decided to keep a bank of Win XP machines for class as that was what the teachers were more familiar with but decided to go with a bank of Macs and some Linux machines as well. I loaded some pictures of the construction of the computer room and the finished product onto the school website.
So what next. I tried a machine on Vista last year for a few months but it didn't integrate properly with XP and ran slower on the fastest machine in the school. The same machne is now running as a Youtube clone where we can run videos on the network. It runs on Linux using PHPmotion . It also runs as a music server that students can link into using iTunes on Windows and Mac machines and Rhythmbox on Linux machines. At one time I figured XP would be the last version of Windows we would use as the future was Linux. Now I'm of the opinion variety is a good thing but we are going to have XP for quite a few years yet as we have a lot of machines that run it just fine but would crawl with Vista. Windows 7? ....... well I'll try it out but I haven't seen anything that excites me too much yet.
On the Linux front I'm planning on moving to Ubuntu 8.04 on servers and clients during the summer. By that time there will be two newer versions, 8.10 and 9.04 but 8.04 is a long term support (LTS) version which means it will get updates through to 2011.
On the Mac front the move from Tiger to Leopard was painless and I suspect the jump to Snow Leopard will be painless as well. I'll probably look at upgrading RAM to 2GB in the Apple machines.
Virtualisation? Nope not yet.
And what do we do with computers here. As with most schools Internet, email, word processing covers 90% of it and all platforms do this equally well. I find Firefox seems to run a lot of the web 2.0 stuff better than Safari and Internet Explorer and web 2.0 stuff is becoming more important all the time. For speed the thin client linux machines win as they are running directly off the server. Apple wins hands down when it comes to more creative stuff with sound and video. This has become more important to us as we now do Digital Creator with the transition year students.
On the server end we are 100% Linux which I have found to be excellent over the last five years or more that we have been using it. I have never used an Apple server other than at a training session. I liked what I saw as much of it was using stuff that was very similar to the way I do things in Linux - in fact much of the software running on the server end is the same but with some extra Apple polish on the GUI. Unless we win the lotto though I reckon we will stick with Linux. I haven't used Windows servers since Windows 2000 server. I know it has come on a lot in the last decade but I reckon Linux is more secure, more robust, less prone to viruses and more cost efficient and so I don't feel any impetus to go back to Redmond.
I'm also wondering will Google's Android carve out a niche somewhere on the network. I keep reading stories like this one http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/15/android_set_top/ that make me think it may well get a role somewhere in the next couple of years.
So what next. I tried a machine on Vista last year for a few months but it didn't integrate properly with XP and ran slower on the fastest machine in the school. The same machne is now running as a Youtube clone where we can run videos on the network. It runs on Linux using PHPmotion . It also runs as a music server that students can link into using iTunes on Windows and Mac machines and Rhythmbox on Linux machines. At one time I figured XP would be the last version of Windows we would use as the future was Linux. Now I'm of the opinion variety is a good thing but we are going to have XP for quite a few years yet as we have a lot of machines that run it just fine but would crawl with Vista. Windows 7? ....... well I'll try it out but I haven't seen anything that excites me too much yet.
On the Linux front I'm planning on moving to Ubuntu 8.04 on servers and clients during the summer. By that time there will be two newer versions, 8.10 and 9.04 but 8.04 is a long term support (LTS) version which means it will get updates through to 2011.
On the Mac front the move from Tiger to Leopard was painless and I suspect the jump to Snow Leopard will be painless as well. I'll probably look at upgrading RAM to 2GB in the Apple machines.
Virtualisation? Nope not yet.
And what do we do with computers here. As with most schools Internet, email, word processing covers 90% of it and all platforms do this equally well. I find Firefox seems to run a lot of the web 2.0 stuff better than Safari and Internet Explorer and web 2.0 stuff is becoming more important all the time. For speed the thin client linux machines win as they are running directly off the server. Apple wins hands down when it comes to more creative stuff with sound and video. This has become more important to us as we now do Digital Creator with the transition year students.
On the server end we are 100% Linux which I have found to be excellent over the last five years or more that we have been using it. I have never used an Apple server other than at a training session. I liked what I saw as much of it was using stuff that was very similar to the way I do things in Linux - in fact much of the software running on the server end is the same but with some extra Apple polish on the GUI. Unless we win the lotto though I reckon we will stick with Linux. I haven't used Windows servers since Windows 2000 server. I know it has come on a lot in the last decade but I reckon Linux is more secure, more robust, less prone to viruses and more cost efficient and so I don't feel any impetus to go back to Redmond.
I'm also wondering will Google's Android carve out a niche somewhere on the network. I keep reading stories like this one http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/15/android_set_top/ that make me think it may well get a role somewhere in the next couple of years.
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