Blog Juice for Educational Technology

We talked a lot about disaster recovery, monitoring system availability, and financial accounting for IT services on day #2.
Does your school district (or other organization) have a disaster recovery plan in place that lists each IT service and how fast you plan to recover back to full operation? Have you had a conversation with […]

Whew! That’s a lot of material. I walked into class this morning and had a thick binder full of detailed ITIL info waiting for me. The terminology is dense and there are a lot of new concepts to absorb. There are only six of us in the class, and I’m the only one from the […]

Those of us using OS X haven’t had the easiest time with OpenOffice.org. Running that open source office suite has always required additional (but free) software that isn’t usually installed by default on OS X systems. Once installed, the software never really fit in with the rest of my system since it wasn’t a native “Aqua” application. […]

Virtualization is one of the hottest technology topics these days. Most people have probably heard about it in the context of Apple’s switch to Intel processors and the release of Parallels Desktop for Mac. Parallels allows you to run Windows applications on an Intel Mac by starting up a full copy of Windows within a […]

Starting tomorrow morning I’ll be in three days of classes at the U. of MN working toward an ITIL foundation certificate. The foundation course will cover all the basics of ITIL, and I’m hoping it will help me as I continue to rethink how we deliver IT services in my school district. I discovered ITIL […]

A professor of mine, Dr. Scott McLeod, was apparently bitten by the blogging bug recently and has started a great new blog called Dangerously Irrelevant about educational technology leadership. This blog was long overdue because Scott is never short on opinions and he has an approachable, thought-provoking way of presenting them.
I was talking to Scott […]

Today was the first day of school in Minnesota. We nearly always start the Tuesday after Labor Day just as the first hint of fall color starts to appear. I suppose one advantage of my one-hour commute out into the country every morning is the chance to watch the changing of the seasons from a […]

It looks like Flickr has started expanding its features by integrating more tightly with its parent company Yahoo!. They’ve recently added the ability to geotag photos by dragging and dropping onto a Yahoo! Maps interface. Once you’ve got some photos geotagged you can see links to all your photos on a map and find other […]

I haven’t posted much this summer. I guess it’s a combination of a new job, a good bit of travel, and a general need to take a bit of a break. As I consider getting back to it I find myself conflicted about my “beat.” This blog isn’t too focused anyway, but I’ve largely stayed […]

I’ve been running quite a bit lately in an effort to shed some weight and improve my fitness. My old heart rate monitor just gave out so I picked up a new Timex Bodylink on eBay. It’s got a GPS receiver that straps to your arm and tracks distance and speed as well as heart […]

What do you do when your technology isn’t enough to set you apart? How about making questionable patent claims and suing your chief competitors? That seems to be Blackboard’s new strategy.
In a nutshell, Blackboard has apparently received a broad patent that seems to cover almost all learning management system concepts in current use. As a […]

Seen on digg: Wikipedia has added a feature called “Cite This Article” to its site. The feature appears as a link in the Toolbox section of each page and provides key bibliographic information as well as citations pre-formatted in all of the major forms. Interestingly, they add the following note at the top of each […]

I had a great time on Thursday afternoon recording an episode of my podcast in front of a live audience.
My first guest was Sonny Portacio, geocacher and Director of Technology for the Escondido Union High School District. Sonny has been doing a ton of work with geocaching lately. He’s created a wiki site for collecting […]