Shift Happens

This video talks about some of the things that are happening globally that are forcing us to think and do things differently. It is impacting on business, our personal lives and education.

This is all a little bit scary for the education industry. We have survived for hundreds of years on a system that revolves around book technology and what you have seen here, on this video, clearly shows that this is needing to change.

I encourage you to leave your thoughts and comments on this topic

Laptop Tax Deductions

There seems to be quite a number of families purchasing laptops to take advantage of the education related tax deductions.

When it comes to the software to put on these laptops, there is a range of very very good free software that is available which will help in keeping costs down. We have a range of this free software installed on all of our computers at school which means that the students work will be compatible with our systems. Here is a list with the website where you can get more information and download it from


Open Office
An excellent office package with word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool (powerpoint) and graphics editing. It will read and write Microsoft Office files
http://www.openoffice.org/

GIMP
Photoshop like program – powerful graphics editing
http://www.gimp.org/

Paint.Net
Excellent general purpose graphics editing
http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

Photofiltre
Excellent general purpose graphics editing
http://photofiltre.free.fr/download_en.htm

Irfanview
Great graphics tool for tasks like resizing or converting lots of images at once
http://www.irfanview.com/

Inkscape
A powerful vector graphics tool lilke Adobe Illustrator
http://www.inkscape.org/

Blender
3D Graphics and animation – complex
http://www.blender.org/

Google Sketchup
Powerful and simple to use 3D Graphics
http://sketchup.google.com/

Audacity
Recording and editing sound for music or orals etc
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Kompozer
For making websites like Frontpage
http://kompozer.net/

Mozilla Firefox
Web browser
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

Mozilla Thunderbird
Email client
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Scratch
A fantastic multimedia programming language.
http://scratch.mit.edu



Well, we also have the steak knives because the DECS license for McAfee antivirus allows us to give students this antivirus software from school to install on their laptops and home computers. It is available on our CD’s drive (t:\mcafee\McafeeHomeUse.exe).

This software is allowed to be installed on home computers that students are using and we will be insisting that it is installed on any laptop that is used at school and accessing our network.

Student Laptops can be brought to Clinton or myself for setting up for use on our network so that they can access the internet at school, print and also use drives H: and S:

We hope that this helps and if you need more information please contact me at the school or via email – ruwoldtp@granths.sa.edu.au

Programming Challenge participants acknowledged

Brett Size, Travis Broad and Greg Mott were presented with certificates of achievement from the 2008, National Computer Science School computer programming challenge. Brett and Travis achieved Credits in this, the first time we have offered this at Grant High.

The Challenge is run by the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney as part of the National Computer Science School (NCSS).

The Challenge is unlike other programming competitions because they teach students how to program as the challenge unfolds rather than expecting them to be an expert coder already. However, if they are a seasoned coder, they have something for them too because the problems range from relatively simple through to mind-bendingly hard.

For 5 weeks, the challenge organisers emailed students a short Python tutorial containing the information they needed to complete the week's programming challenges.

They then had until Sunday night to submit their solutions to the Challenge website, where they were marked. A full set of correct solutions, hints and commentary about each challenge was be sent out the following week.

We intend to be part of this again in 2009. Students can choose to do this as a extra curricular activity or do it as the negotiated activity in the GHS course, Negotiated Computer Learning, in semester 2. In this way the challenge can also be used to contribute towards SACE points.

Please talk to Peter Ruwoldt at the school of by email, ruwoldtp@granths.sa.edu.au, if you need more information about this 2009 event.

NCSS Challenge website - http://challenge.ncss.edu.au/

Sub-notebooks being investigated

The leadership team is currently looking at the eeePC notebook computer to see if it might be an option for students to use for the most common computer needs at school.

The key advantages seem to be:

Solid State hard drive – no moving parts and so the computer is more robust

Comes with the basic computing needs for most subjects as standard including

• wireless and wired networking
• Word processor
• Spreadsheet
• Web browser
• web cam
• microphone
• this list is not exhaustive but lists the tools that are in most demand

Cheap – depending on model cost starts from about $300

Linux Operating system – no issues with viruses and so on

Good battery life starting at 3.5 hours for earlier models

Very small (they are smaller than an average notebook) – they fit nicely on a standard school desk and so it is possible for the computers to be used in a standard classroom rather than having to go to a computer lab

Lower maintenance costs


The key issues seem to be:

• We have had issues with students connecting with their personal network drive. Other schools have got around this by students storing their work on USB sticks.
• They are not a machine for higher end applications and Windows programs will not work on them. They are great for the general purpose applications as listed above.
• The machine is great for online work where students create work to be submitted online. Creating printed versions of work via the network printers is an issue. Printing can happen easily via a printer attached directly to the computer.

Trials with students have been very positive.

It is possible, due to the lower costs of these machines, that more students are more likely to be able to own their own and bring them to school.

We are very interested in your feedback.

Problems with Office 2007

From time to time we are finding a student who is using Word 2007 or Office 2007 at home and has saved their work in the docx file format. The result is that they can not continue with their work at school.

At school we are using Office 2003 and we do not have immediate plans to change to Office 2007. The new features of Office 2007 provide no real productivity advantage at this point.

So that students with Office 2007 or Word 2007 at home can work between school and home easily we suggest that students save their work in the doc format that is compatible with Office 2003 and before. There are instructions here for this.

http://www.uow.edu.au/its/userguides/UOW037922.html

It is also possible to change the default in Word 2007 so that it always saves in the .doc format by following the instructions on the following link.

http://www.walterglenn.com/2007/01/13/save-as-doc-instead-of-docx-in-word-2007/

Please also remember that all computers in the school have Open Office installed on them. Open Office (www.openoffice.org) is free for anyone to download and is also on the CD that all students get when they enroll at the school. It is very good software and, for the record, this article was written using Open Office.

RSS information feed

Have you ever noticed this icon on websites? It is a symbol that is used to indicate that the website has an information feed that you can subscribe to. This means that you can get updates from the website without ever having to go back to it.

This is really useful on websites that have lots of changes. There is a growing number of teachers in this state, country and world that maintain a blog. There are also some very interesting bloggers in the business and management sector. Subscribing to these blogs will allow you to keep up with the discoveries that these people make. Blogging yourself is a way of recording your ideas and discoveries. So RSS is a very effective method for professional development.

Accessing updates in this way generally means that you get a steady stream of information from various sources. It supports good learning because you get to hear about trends in bite sized chunks and from various angles. By writing about what these things mean to you in your blog, for later reference, makes for even more effective learning.

Keep an eye out for this icon and if subscribing to these sorts of feeds is appealing to you then I would recommend using Google Reader as the way of collecting the feeds from the various websites that you subscribe to.

I recommend watching this 3 minute online video ‘RSS in plain English’ to understand this idea better.

What is a Wiki?

Wiki is one of my favourite student collaboration tools. The word 'Wiki' comes from the Hawaiian language and means quick or fast. The word Wiki entered the Oxford English Dictionary in early 2007 having been used to describe a particular sort of online editable website for some years prior to this.

In the IT world, a Wiki is a way to make a collaborative website very quickly and extremely easily. You require minimal technical know how to do it and all you need is an internet connection and a web browser. You do not require any special software.

Wikispaces is one of the many places that you can create a Wiki. It is free and very easy to use. Now that you know this, the next time that your child comes home with a shared (or individual) project to do, making it on a Wiki could be one of the suggestions that you make.

If you would like to learn more about Wiki's then here are a few links

• Wiki for collaborative projects
• Wikipedia article about Wiki