Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

I am excited and nervous and annoyed at the complexity of it all, this whole grant thing.  I got a big one… a BIG one for our district.  A lot of it will be devoted to upgrading some equipment, providing training and a few other items.

I was invited to attend an event put on by Apple called Reaching All Learners.  Amazing, that’s the only word I can say.  I have thought about nothing since then – how to start this.   I also realized that I have way too much going on at the moment and need to step back and focus.  I’m trying to do too much, too soon.  I need to organize and prioritize what I’m working on so that it can receive the utmost attention.

The highlight of my day today was getting even closer to having my Ubuntu Linux lab ready for production.  I have not been able to devote the time to it that I wanted, so I’m working on it in bits and pieces, which is why it seems it’s gone on forever.  However, I’m now about one day away from having it ready to pilot.

I worked out the problem that I was having with the wireless network connection and have had the ones that are fully operational working all of this week without a hitch.  The trick was to leaving the roaming mode enabled, and then removing the requirement to enter the a password to unlock the keyring to connect to the wireless.  This was an ugly hack, but simply leaving the password blank was fine.

Security was mitigated because the only thing that is stored on the keyring is this password.  And since the username and password are posted all over the place and everyone knows it, there’s really no point in actually making you enter it.  When dealing with kids aged 9-12, there’s really no way to implement rock solid security in a lab environment.  Anyway, I digress, security is another matter entirely and a project for another decade.

The second part of my day was spent configuring a lab for Kindergarten through second grade students. It was a rush job, but my team and I managed to get it going in just over an hour.  We still have a little tweaking to do, but it is much better than it was and fully operational.

During that fun job, we were struggling with the problem of teachers that cannot play DVD’s on their computer.  Why this has to be such a difficult process is beyond me.  In my Mac, I put the DVD in and it plays.  With a few minor tweaks, any Linux disto will do the same.  Why, in a PC, is getting a DVD to play so hard and unreliable?  And why does Windows associate Windows Media Player with DVDs when it cannot play them?  I just don’t get why this has to be so difficult to play a DVD.  I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it anyway, because I have written a grant and been funded to buy new laptops for all of the teachers, so it’s only a matter of time before I have to go through all of it again.

I love my job, even on days like today when I want to drop kick computers just to see what happens.

I am almost complete with the Ubuntu linux lab.  Today I installed most of them and managed the updates using my work laptop as a caching server.  This simplified the upgrade process from about a 45 minute process down to about ten.  It helped a lot, and I’m sure that Canonical appreciated the reprieve on bandwidth – at least from my little project.

This, of course, also gave me the perfect opportunity to use Ubuntu on my work laptop.  Tomorrow I am going to test VMWare Workstation to see if I can boot the Windows partition without having to actually boot into it.  This could be something good, who knows.

I took three of the computers to the teacher that I am going to use for the pilot, and she seemed very pleased with the setup.  She seems very intrigued by the prospect of a different operating system and I am glad that I have the opportunity to expose it to her. She is a technology teacher by training, and seems very eager to try it.  I want to have it completed tomorrow so that I can let her try it out this week.  The suspense of whether or not this is going to work is killing me.

I hope that this works, it’s been a headache to set up, but should be relatively trouble free once it’s going. I plan to use a remote management system such as Multivnc or something along those lines for the teacher to manage the computers.

My team was half out today with sickness and other problems, so I was left with just the three of us today.  Today our administrative staff had their first paperless meeting, so I hung around for that to get them started.  There were very few problems, mostly the windows updated rebooted all of the computers during the meeting so we had to go through the logon process again, but that was it.

We’ve been using the Google Apps for Education product, which has some limitations, but the right price.  All in all, it went very well.  During this meeting, however, two of my support coaches decided that it would be a good idea to bury my desk in paper shreddings and hang pictures of me as a kid all around the office.  I preach paperless so much that it was an opportunity for them to have a little fun at my expense.  It was worth a good laugh.

They also took me out to lunch and we wrapped up the day with me working on my Linux lab project, and them parting ways to make some tech support calls and install some dvd playing software.

Today I finished setting up three of the problematic notebooks with Ubuntu Linux.  I had boot time from completely off to 1 minute 9 seconds to a completely usable state.  When coming back after a suspend, it was a matter of a few seconds.

So the next hurdle was to connect to our district’s wireless network and join the domain.  I found some documentation on how to join an Ubuntu machine to the Windows domain and I played with that a little bit.  We were able to successfully join it to the domain.  What I was not expecting was that it completely trashed the machine.  It went from a lean, mean, learning machine to just about as delayed and lousy as the Windows XP Pro OS it was replacing.  That was really unexpected, so it could have been user error.  There’s no reason it should, but now it’s just messed up for some reason.  It’s very odd.

So I now have two computers that are amazingly fast and usable, and one other that has caught whatever all of the other Windows based computers seem to have.  I really am not an anti-Windows person, I have just had the experience of other systems that seem to work better and more consistently.  My personal Windows computer for work has very little problem with anything and seems to be very efficient.  Other than a few little problems – which are not Windows’ fault – it works great.  And in all fairness, XP is a very good OS.  That said, there are also others out there that perform just as well and better.

On a side note, I have recently went back to Mac for my home and I am left wondering why I ever left Mac in the first place.  I can’t really remember a specific time, but it just sort of happened.

What a great day, topped off by watching my kids’ football team win and playing with the iPod Touch and (additional) Macbook that came Fedex priority overnight for our district to demo for the next two weeks.  I love my job.

Amazing, that’s all I have to say!  Not only did I get a lot of information from my call with our designated rep, but the support they described is amazing.  And, they are sending me a demo Macbook and iPod touch to demonstrate in my district.  Wow.  Way to go Apple!  I thought this type of customer service was a thing of the past.

Oh yeah, I have yet to hear from any of the other companies.  I would think in a market like this, the salespeople would be lining up to beg for business.  I am honestly surprised, I expected to have to beat slimy salespeople off with a stick.

For the last two days, I’ve been struggling with a mobile computer lab of 25 laptop PC’s that just doesn’t seem to work right.  It seems that the teachers spend more time fighting with the laptops than actually getting useful stuff done with them.

This is a unique situation because technically, there is nothing wrong with the laptops.  They boot up, log in and are ready to go.  However, the time to get all of this done is very time consuming.  So I have been experimenting with various programs to manage them remotely, with limited success.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I have the knowledge of how a similar lab works that is made of Mac computers.  They have none of these problems.  Unfortunately, there is a resistance to anything that is not Windows based.  I am slowly opening eyes that Microsoft is not the only game in town, and am working to move the mindset away from Mac vs. PC to seeing computers as a tool.

It makes no sense to have this – I don’t even know what to call it – rivalry, for lack of a better term, in the schools.  Schools do not debate on what type of pencil is best, or what type of paper will work. They pick what works and that is what is used.  The same approach should be taken when it comes to computers.  The kids don’t care one way or another, the kids view computers as a tool.  It’s only the staff that has this view of computers as one or the other.

Back to the point, so today I got the go ahead to experiment with this lab that is, for lack of a better term, unusable in its current state.  I opted to use Ubuntu Linux and OpenSolaris as a test case.  As part of another initiative, we are experimenting with options for student laptops.  This will be a good real world test of alternate operating systems.  All these computers need to do is access the Internet for research and do basic word processing.

What surprised me the most is that a teacher that I rely on for her advice seemed very impressed with Ubuntu.  She had never seen it before, so it was a dramatic change.  In fact, these computers were transformed.  So I’m taking two or three laptops and putting Ubuntu on them as a test.  I am so excited that this can be something useful and will require no maintenance.

I am so fortunate to work in a district where I am given the freedom to experiment.  Sometimes they look at me like I have three heads when I have crazy ideas, but overall they work out and improve systems.  I have brought a lot of Free/Open Source software into the district and everyone loves the things that I have done with it.  I only hope this is one more thing.

I will post more as things develop.

So I have this strange situation in which I am asking for salespeople to call me.  It’s crazy, I know.  Part of my job is to do some research to bring back to a committee that will steer decisions in our district in our institution of a 1 to 1 student laptop program.  The exact details of the program are yet to be developed, but I’m gathering pricing, support and other information.

I put calls into several of the major laptop makers.  Some of them had information on their web site that purported their dedication to education and 21st century classrooms – all the right stuff.  As of Tuesday, not one company besides Apple has called me back.  I got a call the same day I left a message from Apple corporate, with the name and info of a representative assigned to our account.  As I was walking out the door today, that rep had called me to set up a time to discuss items.

I am impressed.

I have decided that I need a place to put down thoughts as they occur – a lot of big changes are happening and I believe that we are poised to become a leader in education technology.  I am excited about the opportunities that await us.